Moonchasers and Other Stories

Render Unto Caesar

I never paid much attention to their arguments until the night he hit her.

The summer I was twenty-one I worked construction upstate. This was 1963. The money was good enough to float my final year and a half at college. If I didn’t blow it the way some of the other kids working construction did, that is, on too many nights at the tavern, and too many weekends trying to impress city girls.

The crew was three weeks in Cedar Rapids and so I looked for an inexpensive sleeping room. The one I found was in a neighborhood my middle-class parents wouldn’t have approved of but I wasn’t going to be here long enough for them to know exactly where I was living.

The house was a faded frail Victorian. Upstairs lived an old man named Murchison. He’d worked forty, years on the Crandic as a brakeman and was retired now to sunny days out at Ellis Park watching the softball games, and nights on the front porch with his quarts of cheap Canadian Ace beer and the high sweet smell of his Prince Albert pipe tobacco and his memories of WWII. Oh, yes, and his cat, Caesar. You never saw Murch without that hefty gray cat of his, usually sleeping in his lap when Murch sat in his front porch rocking chair.

And Murch’s fondness for cats didn’t stop there. But I’ll tell you about that later.

Downstairs lived the Brineys. Pete Briney was in his early twenties, handsome in a roughneck kind of way. He sold new Mercurys for a living. He came home in a different car nearly every night, just at dusk, just at the time you could smell the dinner his wife, Kelly, had set out for him.

According to Murch, who seemed to know everything about them, Kelly had just turned nineteen and had already suffered two miscarriages. She was pretty in a sweet, already tired way. She seemed to spend most of her time cleaning the apartment and taking out the garbage and walking up to Dlask’s grocery, two blocks away. One day a plump young woman came over to visit but this led to an argument later that night. Pete Briney did not want his wife to have friends. He seemed to feel that if Kelly had concentrated on her pregnancy, she would not have miscarried.

Briney did not look happy about me staying in the back room on the second floor. The usual tenants were retired men like Murch. I had a tan and was in good shape and while I wasn’t handsome girls didn’t find me repulsive, either. Murch laughed one day and said that Briney had come up and said, “How long is that guy going to be staying here, anyway?” Murch, who felt sorry for Kelly and liked Briney not at all, lied and said I’d probably be here a couple of years.

A few nights later Murch and I were on the front porch. All we had upstairs were two window fans that churned the ninety-three-degree air without cooling it at all. So, after walking up to Dlask’s for a couple of quarts of Canadian Ace and two packs of Pall Malls, I sat down on the front porch and prepared myself to be dazzled by Murch’s tales of WWII in the Pacific theater. (And Murch knew lots of good ones, at least a few of which I strongly suspected were true.)

Between stories we watched the street. Around nine, dusk dying, mothers called their children in. There’s something about the sound of working-class mothers gathering their children — their voices weary, almost melancholy, at the end of another grinding day, the girls they used to be still alive somewhere in their voices, all that early hope and vitality vanishing like the faint echoes of tender music.

And there were the punks in their hot rods picking up the meaty young teenage girls who lived on the block. And the sad factory drunks weaving their way home late from the taverns to cold meals and broken-hearted children. And the furtive lonely single men getting off the huge glowing insect of the city bus, and going upstairs to sleeping rooms and hot plates and lonesome letters from girlfriends in far and distant cities.

And in the midst of all this came a brand-new red Mercury convertible, one far too resplendent for the neighborhood. And it was pulling up to the curb and—

The radio was booming “Surf City” with Jan and Dean — and—

Before the car even stopped, Kelly jerked open her door and jumped out, nearly stumbling in the process.

Briney slammed on the brakes, killed the headlights and then bolted from the car.

Before he reached the curb, he was running.

“You whore!” he screamed.

He was too fast for her. He tackled her even before she reached the sidewalk.

Tackled her and turned her over. And started smashing his fists into her face, holding her down on the ground with his knees on her slender arms, and smashing and smashing and smashing her face—

By then I was off the porch. I was next to him in moments. Given that his victim was a woman, I wasted no time on fair play. I kicked him hard twice in the ribs and then I slammed two punches into the side of his head. She screamed and cried and tried rolling left to escape his punches, and then tried rolling right. I didn’t seem to have fazed him. I slammed two more punches into the side of his head. I could feel these punches working. He pitched sideways, momentarily unconscious, off his wife.

He slumped over on the sidewalk next to Kelly. I got her up right away and held her and let her sob and twist and moan and jerk in my arms. All I could think of were those times when I’d seen my otherwise respectable accountant father beat up my mother, and how I’d cry and run between them terrified and try to stop him with my own small and useless fists...

Murch saw to Briney. “Sonofabitch’s alive, anyway,” he said looking up at me from the sidewalk. “More than he deserves.”

By that time, a small crowd stood on the sidewalk, gawkers in equal parts thrilled and sickened by what they’d just seen Briney do to Kelly...

I got her upstairs to Murch’s apartment and started taking care of her cuts and bruises...

I mentioned that Murch’s affection for cats wasn’t limited to Caesar. I also mentioned that Murch was retired, which meant that he had plenty of time for his chosen calling.

The first Saturday I had off, a week before the incident with Pete and Kelly Briney, I sat on the front porch reading a John D. MacDonald paperback and drinking a Pepsi and smoking Pall Malls. I was glad for a respite from the baking, bone-cracking work of summer road construction.

Around three that afternoon, I saw Murch coming down the sidewalk carrying a shoebox. He walked toward the porch, nodded hello, then walked to the backyard. I wondered if something was wrong. He was a talker, Murch was, and to see him so quiet bothered me.

I put down my Pepsi and put down my book and followed him, a seventy-one-year-old man with a stooped back and liver-spotted hands and white hair that almost glowed in the sunlight and that ineluctable dignity that comes to people who’ve spent a life at hard honorable work others consider menial.

He went into the age-worn garage and came out with a garden spade. The wide backyard was burned stubby grass and a line of rusted silver garbage cans. The picket fence sagged with age and the walk was all busted and jagged. To the right of white flapping sheets drying on the clothesline was a small plot of earth that looked like a garden.

He set the shoebox down on the ground and went to work with the shovel. He was finished in three or four minutes. A nice fresh hole had been dug in the dark rich earth.

He bent down and took the lid from the shoebox. From inside he lifted something with great and reverent care. At first I couldn’t see what it was. I moved closer. Lying across his palms was the dead body of a small calico cat. The blood on the scruffy white fur indicated that death had been violent, probably by car.

He knelt down and lowered the cat into the freshly dug earth. He remained kneeling and then closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross.

And then he scooped the earth in his hands and filled in the grave.

I walked over to him just as he was standing up.

“You’re some guy, Murch,” I said.

He looked startled. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I was watching.” I nodded to the ground. “The cat, I mean.”

“They’ve been damn good friends to me — cats have — figure it’s the least I can do for them.”

I felt I’d intruded; embarrassed him. He picked up the spade and started over to the garage.

“Nobody gives a damn about cats,” he said. “A lot of people even hate ’em. That’s why I walk around every few days with my shoebox and if I see a dead one, I pick it up and bring it back here and bury it. They’re nice little animals.” He grinned. “Especially Caesar. He’s the only good friend I’ve made since my wife died ten years ago.”

Murch put the shovel in the garage. When he came back out, he said, “You in any kind of mood for a game of checkers?”

I grinned. “I hate to pick on old farts like you.”

He grinned back. “We’ll see who’s the old fart here.”

When I got home the night following the incident with Kelly and Briney, several people along the block stopped to ask me about the beating. They’d heard this and they’d heard that but since I lived in the house, they figured I could set them right. I couldn’t, or at least I said I couldn’t, because I didn’t like the quiet glee in their eyes, and the subtle thrill in their voices.

Murch was on the porch. I went up and sat down and he put Caesar in my lap the way he usually did. I petted the big fellow till he purred so hard he sounded like a plane about to take off. Too bad most humans weren’t as appreciative of kindness as good old Caesar.

When I spoke, I sort of whispered. I didn’t want the Brineys to hear.

“You don’t have to whisper, Todd,” Murch said, sucking on his pipe. “They’re both gone. Don’t know where he is, and don’t care. She left about three this afternoon. Carrying a suitcase.”

“You really think she’s leaving him?”

“Way he treats her, I hope so. Nobody should be treated like that, especially a nice young woman like her.” He reached over and petted Caesar who was sleeping in my lap. Then he sat back and drew on his pipe again and said, “I told her to go. Told her what happens to women who let their men beat them. It keeps on getting worse and worse until—” He shook his head. “The missus and I knew a woman whose husband beat her to death one night. Right in front of her two little girls.”

“Briney isn’t going to like it, you telling her to leave him.”

“To hell with Briney. I’m not afraid of him.” He smiled. “I’ve got Caesar here to protect me.”

Briney didn’t get home till late. By that time we were up off the porch and in our respective beds. Around nine a cool rain had started falling. I was getting some good sleep when I heard him down there.

The way he yelled and the way he smashed things, I knew he was drunk. He’d obviously discovered that his compliant little wife had left him. Then there was an abrupt and anxious silence. And then there was his crying. He wasn’t any better at it than I was, didn’t really know how, and so his tears came out in violent bursts that resembled throwing up. But even though I was tempted to feel sorry for him, he soon enough made me hate him again. Between bursts of tears he’d start calling his wife names, terrible names that should never have been put to a woman like Kelly.

I wasn’t sure of the time when he finally gave it all up and went to bed. Late, with just the sounds of the trains rushing through the night in the hills, and the hoot of a barn owl lost somewhere in leafy midnight trees.

The next couple days I worked overtime. The road project had fallen behind. In the early weeks of the job there’d been an easy camaraderie on the work site. But that was gone for good now. The supervisors no longer took the time to joke, and looked you over skeptically every time you walked back to the wagon for a drink of water.

Kelly came back at dusk on Friday night. She stepped out of a brand-new blue Mercury sedan, Pete Briney at the wheel. She carried a lone suitcase. When she reached the porch steps and saw Murch and me, she looked away and walked quickly toward the door. Briney was right behind her. Obviously he’d told her not to speak to us.

That night, Murch and I spoke in whispers, both of us naturally wondering what had happened. Briney had gone over to her mother’s, where Murch had suggested she go, and somehow convinced Kelly to come back.

They kept the curtains closed, the TV low and if they spoke, it was so quietly we couldn’t hear them.

I spent an hour with Caesar on my lap and Murch in my ear about politicians. He was a John Kennedy supporter and tried to convince me I should be, too.

For the next two days and nights, I didn’t see or hear either of the Brineys. On Saturday afternoon, Murch returned from one of his patrols with his shoebox. He went in the back and buried a cat he’d found and then came out on the porch to smoke a pipe. “Poor little thing,” he said. “Wasn’t any bigger than this.” With his hands, he indicated how tiny the kitten had been.

Kelly came out on the porch a few minutes later. She wore a white blouse and jeans and had her auburn hair swept back into a loose ponytail. She looked neat and clean. And nervous.

She muttered a hello and started down the stairs.

“Ain’t you ever going to talk to us again, Kelly?” Murch said. There was no sarcasm in his voice, just an obvious sadness.

She stopped halfway toward the sidewalk. Her back was to us. For long moments she just stood there.

When she turned around and looked at us, she said, “Pete don’t want me to talk to either of you.” Then, gently, “I miss sitting out on the porch.”

“He’s your husband, honey. You shouldn’t let him be your jailer,” Murch said.

“He said he was sorry about the other night. About hitting me.” She paused. “He came over to my mother’s house and he told my whole family he was sorry. He even started crying.”

Murch didn’t say anything.

“I know you don’t like him, Murch, but I’m his wife and like the priest said, I owe him another chance.”

“You be careful of him, especially when he’s drinking.”

“He promised he wouldn’t hit me no more, Murch. He gave his solemn word.”

She looked first at him and then at me, and then was gone down the block to the grocery store. From a distance she looked fifteen years old.

He went two more nights, Briney did, before coming home drunk and loud.

I knew just how drunk he was because I was sitting on the porch around ten o’clock when a new pink Mercury came up and scraped the edge of its right bumper long and hard against the curbing.

The headlights died. Briney sat in the dark car smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was staring at us.

Murch just sat there with Caesar on his lap. I just sat there waiting for trouble. I could sense it coming and I wanted it over with.

Briney got out of the car and tried hard to walk straight up the walk to the porch. He wasn’t a comic drunk, doing an alcoholic rhumba, but he certainly could not have passed a sobriety test.

He came up on the porch and stopped. His chest was heaving from anger. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and Old Spice.

“You think I don’t fucking know the shit you’re putting in my old lady’s mind?” he said to Murch. “Huh?”

Murch didn’t say anything.

“I asked you a fucking question, old man.”

Murch said, softly, “Why don’t you go in and sleep it off, kid?”

“You’re the goddamned reason she went to her mother’s last week. You told her to!”

And then he lunged at Murch and I was up out of my chair. He was too drunk to swing with any grace or precision but he caught me on the side of the head with the punch he’d intended for Murch, and for a dizzy moment I felt my knees go. He could hit. No doubt about that.

And then he was on me, having given up on Murch, and I had to take four or five more punches while I tried to gather myself and bring some focus to my fear and rage.

I finally got him in the ribs with a good hooking right, and I felt real exhilaration when I heard the air whoof out of him, and then I banged another one just to the right off his jaw and backed him up several inches and then—

Then Kelly was on the porch crying and screaming and putting herself between us, a child trying to separate two mindless mastodons from killing each other and—

“You promised you wouldn’t drink no more!” she kept screaming over and over at Briney.

All he could do was stand head hung and shamed like some whipped giant there in the dirty porch light she’d turned on. “But honey...” he’d mumble. Or “But sweetheart...” Or “But Kelly, Jeez I...”

“Now you get inside there, and right now!” she said, no longer his wife but his mother. And she sternly pointed to the door. And he shambled toward it, not looking back at any of us, just shuffling and shambling, drunk and dazed and sweaty, depleted of rage and pride, and no longer fierce at all.

When he was inside, the apartment door closed, she said, “I’m real sorry, Todd. I heard everything from inside.”

“It’s all right.”

“You hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m real sorry.”

“I know.”

She went over to Murch and touched him tenderly on the shoulder. He was standing up, this tired and suddenly very old-looking man, and he had good gray Caesar in his arms. Kelly leaned over and petted Caesar and said, “I wish I had a husband like you, Caesar.”

She went back inside. The rest of our time on the porch, the Brineys spoke again in whispers.

Just before he went up to bed, Murch said, “He’s going to kill her someday. You know that, don’t you, Todd?”

This time I was ready for it. Six hours had gone by. I’d watched the late movie and then lay on the bed smoking a cigarette in the darkness and just staring at the play of streetlight and tree shadow on the ceiling.

The first sound from below was very, very low and I wasn’t even sure what it was. But I threw my legs off the bed and sat up, grabbing for my cigarettes as I did so.

When the sound came again, I recognized it immediately for what it was. A soft sobbing. Kelly.

Voices. Muffled. Bedsprings squeaking. A curse — Briney.

And then, sharp and unmistakable, a slap.

And then two, three slaps.

Kelly screaming. Furniture being shoved around.

I was up from the sweaty bed and into my jeans, not bothering with a shirt, and down the stairs two at a lime.

By now, Kelly’s screams filled the entire house. Behind me, at the top of the stairs, I could hear Murch shouting down, “You gotta stop him, son! You gotta stop him!”

More slaps; the muffled thud of closed fists pounding into human flesh and bone.

I stood back from the door and raised my foot and kicked with the flat of my heel four limes before shattering the wood into jagged splinters.

Briney had Kelly pinned on the floor as he had last week, and he was putting punches into her at will. Even at a glance, I could see that her nose was broken. Ominously, blood leaked from her ear.

I got him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. He still wasn’t completely sober so he couldn’t put up the resistance he might have at another time.

I meant to make him unconscious and that was exactly what I did. dragged him over to the door. He kept swinging at me and occasionally landing hard punches to my ribs and kidney but at the moment I didn’t care. He smelled of sweat and pure animal rage and Kelly’s fresh blood. I got him to the door frame and held him high by his hair and then slammed his temple against the edge of the frame.

It only took once. He went straight down to the floor in an unmoving heap.

Murch came running through the door. “I called the cops!”

He went immediately to Kelly, knelt by her. She was over on her side, crying crazily and throwing up in gasps that shook her entire body. Her face was a mask of blood. He had ripped her nightgown and dug fierce raking fingers over her breasts. She just kept crying.

Even this late at night, the neighbors were up for a good show, maybe two dozen of them standing in the middle of the street as the whipping red lights of police cars and ambulance gave the crumbling neighborhood a nervous new life.

Kelly had slipped into unconsciousness and was brought out strapped to a stretcher.

Two uniformed cops questioned Briney on the porch. He kept pointing to me and Murch, who stood holding Caesar and stroking him gently.

There was an abrupt scuffle as Briney bolted and took a punch at one of the cops. He was a big man, this cop, and he brought Briney down with two punches. Then he cuffed him and took him to the car.

From inside the police vehicle, Briney glared at me and kept glaring until the car disappeared into the shadows at the end of the block.

Kelly was a week in the hospital. Murch and I visited her twice. In addition to a broken nose, she’d also suffered a broken rib and two broken teeth. She had a hard time talking. She just kept crying softly and shaking her head and patting the hands we both held out to her.

Her brother, a burly man in his twenties, came over to the house two days later with a big U-Haul and three friends and cleaned out the Briney apartment. Murch and I gave him a hand loading.

The newspaper said that Peter James Briney had posted a $2500 bond and had been released on bail. He obviously wasn’t going to live downstairs. Kelly’s brother hadn’t left so much as a fork behind, and the landlord had already nailed a Day-Glo For Rent sign on one of the front porch pillars.

As for me, the crew was getting ready to move on. In two more days, we’d pack and head up the highway toward Des Moines.

I tried to make my last two nights with Murch especially good. There was a pizza and beer restaurant over on Ellis Boulevard and on the second to last night, I took him there for dinner. I even coerced him into telling me some of those good old WWII stories of his.

The next night, the last night in Cedar Rapids, we had to work overtime again.

I got home after nine, when it was full and starry dark.

I was walking up the street when one of the neighbors came down from his porch and said, “They took him away.”

I stopped. My body temperature dropped several degrees. I knew what was coming. “Took who off?”

“Murch. You know, that guy where you live.”

“The cops?”

The man shook his head. “Ambulance. Murch had a heart attack.”

I ran home. Up the stairs. Murch’s place was locked. I had a key for his apartment in my room. I got it and opened the place up.

I got the lights on and went through each of the four small rooms. Murch was an orderly man. Though all the furnishings were old, from the ancient horsehair couch to the scarred chest of drawers, there was an obstinate if shabby dignity about them, much like Murch himself.

I found what I was looking for in the bathtub. Apparently the ambulance attendants hadn’t had time to do anything more than rush Murch to the hospital.

Caesar, or what was left of him anyway, they’d left behind.

He lay in the center of the old claw-footed bathtub. He had been stabbed dozens of times. His gray fur was matted and stiff with his own blood. He’d died in the midst of human frenzy.

I didn’t have to wonder who’d done this or what had given Murch his heart attack.

I went over to the phone and called both hospitals. Murch was at Mercy. The nurse I spoke with said that he had suffered a massive stroke and was unconscious. The prognosis was not good.

After I hung up, I went through the phone book looking for Brineys. It took me six calls to get the right one but finally I found Pete Briney’s father. I convinced him that I was a good friend of Pete’s and that I was just in town for the night and that I really wanted to see the old sonofagun. “Well,” he said, “he hangs out at the Log Cabin a lot.”

The Log Cabin was a tavern not far away. I was there within fifteen minutes.

The moment I stepped through the bar, into a working-class atmosphere of clacking pool balls and whiney country western music, I saw him.

He was in a booth near the back, laughing about something with a girl with a beehive hairdo and a quick beery smile.

When he saw me, he got scared. He left the booth and ran toward the back door. By now, several people were watching. I didn’t care.

I went out the back door after him. I stood beneath a window-unit air conditioner that sounded like a B-52 starting up and bled water like a wound. The air was hot and pasty and I slapped at two mosquitos biting my neck.

Ahead of me was a gravel parking lot. The only light was spill from the back windows of the tavern. The lot was about half full. Briney hadn’t had time to get into that nice golden Mercury convertible at the end of the lot. He was hiding somewhere behind one of the cars.

I walked down the lot, my heels adjusting to the loose and wobbly feel of the gravel beneath.

He came lunging out from behind a pickup truck. Because I’d been expecting him, I was able to duck without much problem.

I turned and faced him. He was crouched down, ready to jump at me.

“I’d still have a wife if it wasn’t for you two bastards,” he said.

“You’re a pretty brave guy, Briney. You wait till Murch goes somewhere and then you sneak in and kill his cat. And then Murch comes home and finds Caesar dead and—”

But I was through talking.

I kicked him clean and sharp. I broke his nose. He gagged and screamed and started puking — he must have had way too much to drink that night — and sank to his knees and then I went over and kicked him several times in the ribs.

I kicked him until I heard the sharp brittle sound of bones breaking, and until he pitched forward, still screaming and crying, to the gravel. Then I went up and kicked him in the back of the head.

A couple of his friends from the tavern came out and started toward me but I was big enough and angry enough that they were wary.

“Personal dispute,” I said. “Nothing to do with you boys at all.”

Then they went over and tried to help their friend to his feet. It wasn’t easy. He was a mess.

Murch died an hour and ten minutes after I got to the hospital. I went into his room and looked at all the alien tentacles stretching from beeping cold metal boxes to his warm but failing body. I stood next to his bed until a doctor came in and asked very softly and politely if I’d mind waiting in the hall while they did some work.

It was while the doctor was in there that Murch died. He had never regained consciousness and so we’d never even said proper good-byes.

At the house, I went into Murch’s apartment and found the shoebox and took it into the bathroom and gathered up the remains of poor Caesar.

I took the box down the stairs and out to the garage where I got the garden spade. Then I went over and in the starry prairie night, buried Caesar properly. I even blessed myself, though I wasn’t a Catholic, and then knelt down and took the rich damp earth and covered Caesar’s grave.

I didn’t sleep that night. I just sat up in my little room with my last quart of Canadian Ace and my last pack of Pall Malls and thought about Kelly and thought about Caesar and especially I thought about Murch.

Just at dawn, it started to rain, a hot dirty city rain that would neither cool nor cleanse, and I packed my bags and left.