Moonchasers and Other Stories

Turn Away

On Thursday she was there again. (This was on a soap opera he’d picked up by accident looking for a western movie to watch since he was all caught up on his work.) Parnell had seen her Monday but not Tuesday then not Wednesday either. But Thursday she was there again. He didn’t know her name, hell it didn’t matter, she was just this maybe twenty-two twenty-three-year-old who looked a lot like a nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, he’d dated a couple of times (Les Elgart had been playing on the Loop) six seven months after returning from WWII.

Now this young look-alike was on a soap opera and he was watching.

A frigging soap opera.

He was getting all dazzled up by her, just as he had on Monday, when the knock came sharp and three times, almost like a code.

He wasn’t wearing the slippers he’d gotten recently at Kmart so he had to find them, and he was drinking straight from a quart of Hamms so he had to put it down. When you were the manager of an apartment building, even one as marginal as the Alma, you had to go to the door with at least a little “decorousness,” the word Sgt. Meister, his boss, had always used back in Parnell’s cop days.

It was 11:23 A.M. and most of the Alma’s tenants were at work. Except for the ADC mothers who had plenty of work of their own kind what with some of the assholes down at social services (Parnell had once gone down there with the Jamaican woman in 201 and threatened to punch out the little bastard who was holding up her check), not to mention the sheer simple burden of knowing the sweet innocent little child you loved was someday going to end up just as blown-out and bitter and useless as yourself.

He went to the door, shuffling in his new slippers which he’d bought two sizes too big because of his bunions.

The guy who stood there was no resident of the Alma. Not with his razor-cut black hair and his three-piece banker’s suit and the kind of melancholy in his pale blue eyes that was almost sweet and not at all violent. He had a fancy mustache spoiled by the fact that his pink lips were a woman’s.

“Mr. Parnell?”

Parnell nodded.

The man, who was maybe thirty-five, put out a hand. Parnell took it, all the while thinking of the soap opera behind him and the girl who looked like the one from Enid, Oklahoma. (Occasionally he bought whack-off magazines but the girls either looked too easy or too arrogant so he always had to close his eyes anyway and think of somebody he’d known in the past.) He wanted to see her, fuck this guy. Saturday he would be sixty-one and about all he had to look forward to was a phone call from his kid up the Oregon coast. His kid, who, God rest her soul, was his mother’s son and not Parnell’s, always ran a stopwatch while they talked so as to save on the phone bill. Hi Dad Happy Birthday and It’s Been Really Nice Talking To You. I–Love-You-Bye.

“What can I do for you?” Parnell said. Then as he stood there watching the traffic go up and down Cortland Boulevard in baking July sunlight, Parnell realized that the guy was somehow familiar to him.

The guy said, “You know my father.”

“Jesus H. Christ—”

“—Bud Garrett—”

“—Bud. I’ll be goddamned.” He’d already shaken the kid’s hand and he couldn’t do that again so he kind of patted him on the shoulder and said, “Come on in.”

“I’m Richard Garrett.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Richard.”

He took the guy inside. Richard looked around at the odds and ends of furniture that didn’t match and at all the pictures of dead people and immediately put a smile on his face as if he just couldn’t remember when he’d been so enchanted with a place before, which meant of course that he saw the place for the dump Parnell knew it to be.

“How about a beer?” Parnell said, hoping he had something besides the generic stuff he’d bought at the 7-Eleven a few months ago.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

Richard sat on the edge of the couch with the air of somebody waiting for his flight to be announced. He was all ready to jump up. He kept his eyes downcast and he kept fiddling with his wedding ring. Parnell watched him. Sometimes it turned out that way. Richard’s old man had been on the force with Parnell. They’d been best friends. Garrett Sr. was a big man, six-three and fleshy but strong, a brawler and occasionally a mean one when the hootch didn’t settle in him quite right. But his son... Sometimes it turned out that way. He was manly enough, Parnell supposed, but there was an air of being trapped in himself, of petulance, that put Parnell off.

Three or four minutes of silence went by. The soap opera ended with Parnell getting another glance of the young lady. Then a “CBS Newsbreak” came on. Then some commercials. Richard didn’t seem to notice that neither of them had said anything for a long time. Sunlight made bars through the venetian blinds. The refrigerator thrummed. Upstairs but distantly a kid bawled.

Parnell didn’t realize it at first, not until Richard sniffed, that Bud Garrett’s son was either crying or doing something damn close to it.

“Hey, Richard, what’s the problem?” Parnell said, making sure to keep his voice soft.

“My, my Dad.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

Richard looked up with his pale blue eyes. “He’s dying.”

“Jesus.”

Richard cleared his throat. “It’s how he’s dying that’s so bad.”

“Cancer?”

Richard said, “Yes. Liver. He’s dying by inches.”

“Shit.”

Richard nodded. Then he fell once more into his own thoughts. Parnell let him stay there a while, thinking about Bud Garrett. Bud had left the force on a whim that all the cops said would fail. He started a rent-a-car business with a small inheritance he’d come into. That was twenty years ago. Now Bud Garrett lived up in Woodland Hills and drove the big Mercedes and went to Europe once a year. Bud and Parnell had tried to remain friends but beer and champagne didn’t mix. When the Mrs. had died Bud had sent a lavish display of flowers to the funeral and a note that Parnell knew to be sincere but they hadn’t had any real contact in years.

“Shit,” Parnell said again.

Richard looked up, shaking his head as if trying to escape the aftereffects of drugs. “I want to hire you.”

“Hire me? As what?”

“You’re a personal investigator aren’t you?”

“Not anymore. I mean I kept my ticket — it doesn’t cost that much to renew it — but hell I haven’t had a job in five years.” He waved a beefy hand around the apartment. “I manage these apartments.”

From inside his blue pin-striped suit Richard took a sleek wallet. He quickly counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills and put them on the blond coffee table next to the stack of Luke Short paperbacks. “I really want you to help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Kill my father.”

Now Parnell shook his head. “Jesus, kid, are you nuts or what?”

Richard stood up. “Are you busy right now?”

Parnell looked around the room again. “I guess not.”

“Then why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

When the elevator doors opened to let them out on the sixth floor of the hospital, Parnell said, “I want to be sure that you understand me.”

He took Richard by the sleeve and held him and stared into his pale blue eyes. “You know why I’m coming here, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m coming to see your father because we’re old friends. Because I cared about him a great deal and because I still do. But that’s the only reason.”

“Right.”

Parnell frowned. “You still think I’m going to help you, don’t you?”

“I just want you to see him.”

On the way to Bud Garrett’s room they passed an especially good-looking nurse. Parnell felt guilty about recognizing her beauty. His old friend was dying just down the hall and here Parnell was worrying about some nurse.

Parnell went around the corner of the door. The room was dark. It smelled sweet from flowers and fetid from flesh literally rotting.

Then he looked at the frail yellow man in the bed. Even in the shadows you could see his skin was yellow.

“I’ll be damned,” the man said.

It was like watching a skeleton talk by some trick of magic.

Parnell went over and tried to smile his ass off but all he could muster was just a little one. He wanted to cry until he collapsed. You sonofabitch, Parnell thought, enraged. He just wasn’t sure who he was enraged with. Death or God or himself — or maybe even Bud himself for reminding Parnell of just how terrible and scary it could get near the end.

“I’ll be damned,” Bud Garrett said again.

He put out his hand and Parnell took it. Held it for a long time.

“He’s a good boy, isn’t he?” Garrett said, nodding to Richard.

“He sure is.”

“I had to raise him after his mother died. I did a good job, if I say so myself.”

“A damn good job, Bud.”

This was a big private room that more resembled a hotel suite. There was a divan and a console TV and a dry bar. There was a Picasso lithograph and a walk-in closet and a deck to walk out on. There was a double-sized water bed with enough controls to drive a space ship and a big stereo and a bookcase filled with hardcovers. Most people Parnell knew dreamed of living in such a place. Bud Garrett was dying in it.

“He told you,” Garrett said.

“What?” Parnell spun around to face Richard, knowing suddenly the worst truth of all.

“He told you.”

“Jesus, Bud, you sent him, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

Parnell looked at Garrett again. How could somebody who used to have a weight problem and who could throw around the toughest drunk the barrio ever produced get to be like this. Nearly every time he talked he winced. And all the time he smelled. Bad.

“I sent for you because none of us is perfect,” Bud said.

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s afraid.”

“Richard?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t blame him. I’d be afraid, too.” Parnell paused and stared at Bud. “You asked him to kill you, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It’s his responsibility to do it.”

Richard stepped up to his father’s bedside and said, “I agree with that, Mr. Parnell. It is my responsibility. I just need a little help is all.”

“Doing what?”

“If I buy cyanide, it will eventually be traced to me and I’ll be tried for murder. If you buy it, nobody will ever connect you with my father.”

Parnell shook his head. “That’s bullshit. That isn’t what you want me for. There are a million ways you could get cyanide without having it traced back.”

Bud Garrett said, “I told him about you. I told him you could help give him strength.”

“I don’t agree with any of this, Bud. You should die when it’s your time to die. I’m a Catholic.”

Bud laughed hoarsely. “So am I, you asshole.” He coughed and said, “The pain’s bad. I’m beyond any help they can give me. But it could go on for a long time.” Then, just as his son had an hour ago, Bud Garrett began crying almost imperceptibly. “I’m scared, Parnell. I don’t know what’s on the other side but it can’t be any worse than this.” He reached out his hand and for a long time Parnell just stared at it but then he touched it.

“Jesus,” Parnell said. “It’s pretty fucking confusing, Bud. It’s pretty fucking confusing.”

Richard took Parnell out to dinner that night. It was a nice place. The table cloths were starchy white and the waiters all wore shiny shoes. Candles glowed inside red glass.

They’d had four drinks apiece, during which Richard told Parnell about his two sons (six and eight respectively) and about the perils and rewards of the rent-a-car business and about how much he liked windsurfing even though he really wasn’t much good at it.

Just after the arrival of the fourth drink, Richard took something from his pocket and laid it on the table.

It was a cold capsule.

“You know how the Tylenol Killer in Chicago operated?” Richard asked.

Parnell nodded.

“Same thing,” Richard said. “I took the cyanide and put it in a capsule.”

“Christ. I don’t know about it.”

“You’re scared, too, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am.”

Richard sipped his whiskey-and-soda. With his regimental striped tie he might have been sitting in a country club. “May I ask you something?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Sure.”

“Then if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, correct?”

Parnell frowned. “I’m not much of an intellectual, Richard.”

“But if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, right?”

“Right.”

“Do you think what’s happening to my father is good?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“Then you must also believe that God isn’t doing this to him — right?”

“Right.”

Richard held up the capsule. Stared at it. “All I want you to do is give me a ride to the hospital. Then just wait in the car down in the parking lot.”

“I won’t do it.”

Richard signaled for another round.

“I won’t goddamn do it,” Parnell said.

By the time they left the restaurant Richard was too drunk to drive. Parnell got behind the wheel of the new Audi. “Why don’t you tell me where you live? I’ll take you home and take a cab from there.”

“I want to go to the hospital.”

“No way, Richard.”

Richard slammed his fist against the dashboard. “You fucking owe him that, man!” he screamed.

Parnell was shocked, and a bit impressed, with Richard’s violent side. If nothing else, he saw how much Richard loved his old man. “Richard, listen.”

Richard sat in a heap against the opposite door. His tears were dry ones, choking ones. “Don’t give me any of your speeches.” He wiped snot from his nose on his sleeve. “My dad always told me what a tough guy Parnell was.” He turned to Parnell, anger in him again. “Well, I’m not tough, Parnell, and so I need to borrow some of your toughness so I can get that man out of his pain and grant him his one last fucking wish. DO YOU GODDAMN UNDERSTAND ME?”

He smashed his fist on the dashboard again.

Parnell turned on the ignition and drove them away.

When they reached the hospital, Parnell found a parking spot and pulled in. The mercury vapor lights made him feel as though he were on Mars. Bugs smashed against the windshield.

“I’ll wait here for you,” Parnell said.

Richard looked over at him. “You won’t call the cops?”

“No.”

“And you won’t come up and try to stop me?”

“No.”

Richard studied Parnell’s face. “Why did you change your mind?”

“Because I’m like him.”

“Like my father?”

“Yeah. A coward. I wouldn’t want the pain, either. I’d be just as afraid.”

All Richard said, and this he barely whispered, was “Thanks.”

While he sat there Parnell listened to country western music and then a serious political call-in show and then a call-in show where a lady talked about Venusians who wanted to pork her and then some salsa music and then a religious minister who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn in the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

By then Richard came back.

He got in the car and slammed the door shut and said, completely sober now, “Let’s go.”

Parnell got out of there.

They went ten long blocks before Parnell said, “You didn’t do it, did you?”

Richard got hysterical. “You sonofabitch! You sonofabitch!”

Parnell had to pull the car over to the curb. He hit Richard once, a fast clean right hand, not enough to make him unconscious but enough to calm him down.

“You didn’t do it, did you?”

“He’s my father, Parnell. I don’t know what to do. I love him so much I don’t want to see him suffer. But I love him so much I don’t want to see him die, either.”

Parnell let the kid sob. He thought of his old friend Bud Garrett and what a good goddamn fun buddy he’d been and then he started crying, too.

When Parnell came down Richard was behind the steering wheel.

Parnell got in the car and looked around the empty parking lot and said, “Drive.”

“Any place especially?”

“Out along the East River road. Your old man and I used to fish off that little bridge there.”

Richard drove them. From inside his sport coat Parnell took the pint of Jim Beam.

When they got to the bridge Parnell said, “Give me five minutes alone and then you can come over, OK?”

Richard was starting to sob again.

Parnell got out of the car and went over to the bridge. In the hot night you could hear the hydroelectric dam half a mile downstream and smell the fish and feel the mosquitoes feasting their way through the evening.

He thought of what Bud Garrett had said, “Put it in some whiskey for me, will you?”

So Parnell had obliged.

He stood now on the bridge looking up at the yellow circle of moon thinking about dead people, his wife and many of his WWII friends, the rookie cop who’d died of a sudden tumor, his wife with her rosary-wrapped hands. Hell, there was probably even a chance that nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, was dead.

“What do you think’s on the other side?” Bud Garrett had asked just half an hour ago. He’d almost sounded excited. As if he were a farm kid about to ship out with the Merchant Marines.

“I don’t know,” Parnell had said.

“It scare you, Parnell?”

“Yeah,” Parnell had said. “Yeah it does.”

Then Bud Garrett had laughed. “Don’t tell the kid that. I always told him that nothin’ scared you.”

Richard came up the bridge after a time. At first he stood maybe a hundred feet away from Parnell. He leaned his elbows on the concrete and looked out at the water and the moon. Parnell watched him, knowing it was all Richard, or anybody, could do.

Look out at the water and the moon and think about dead people and how you yourself would soon enough be dead.

Richard turned to Parnell then and said, his tears gone completely now, sounding for the first time like Parnell’s sort of man, “You know, Parnell, my father was right. You’re a brave sonofabitch. You really are.”

Parnell knew it was important for Richard to believe that — that there were actually people in the world who didn’t fear things the way most people did — so Parnell didn’t answer him at all.

He just took his pint out and had himself a swig and looked some more at the moon and the water.