Shoot the Moonlight Out, page 16
“Come on. You know what’s on the hard drive!”
“I don’t know anything. I know my job. Report back on where the contents of the package originated, that’s what Greg said. I don’t know your fathers. I don’t know Jersey politics. I don’t know jack about hard drives. I don’t even have a typewriter.”
“It’s records,” Don says, his guard down. He still believes Junky Greg’s coming through with the hard drive. “A charity thing we set up. Forget it.”
“Money laundering?” Charlie says. “Embezzlement? Good shit.” He reaches into the deep inner pocket of his linen jacket and takes out the gun with its silencer. He shoots Don on one bed and Randy on the other. Both square in the forehead. Don’s body slumps forward, while Randy’s falls to the side. Nice quilts on these beds too, Charlie notices. Different colors. A lot of hard work in those quilts.
He looks around the room to make sure no one is hiding anywhere. He uses his sleeve to open the bathroom door. Nothing. He uses his sleeve again to push open the closet. Pillows and an ironing board.
He hasn’t touched anything else. It’s a clean operation. The score is purified now. The politician fathers don’t know shit. The Ivy League drug guy doesn’t know shit. The hard drive will surface and these will look like righteous killings. The office lady won’t remember anything about the guy next door except he paid cash and wanted to see her fucked-up feet.
Charlie takes the DO NOT DISTURB hanger off the interior knob with his sleeve. He turns the bolt mechanism, also with his sleeve, and then pulls the door shut behind him as he leaves, confirming it’s locked. He puts the hanger on the exterior knob, careful not to brush it with his fingers.
He doesn’t go back to the room next door. The key is still on the pillow, the door unlocked. Consider him checked out. He’s not sure how long Don and Randy paid for. Could be a day or two before they’re found with the hanger on the door. Could be a week before the housekeeper notices the stink and gets a key from the office.
Instead, Charlie walks back to the Tropicana. Maybe a few more nights of gambling and fun are in order before heading back to Brooklyn to retrieve his prize from Max.
JACK
When Jack and Lily are done at the Roulette, it’s after eight. They walk home on Eighty-Sixth Street. A warm summer night. Cugines cruising in big cars under the El with their windows open, techno booming. Sidewalks packed with people rushing home or to the gym or out to eat. Commuters getting off the train late. A deep ease to it. The kind of night where things don’t go wrong. The weather’s too nice. A rare vibe of contentment in the neighborhood.
They stop for Italian ices at Lenny’s. Lily gets chocolate. Jack gets lemon. She asks what he’s doing now, saying she doesn’t want to go home. She doesn’t want to get home and see that there are ten messages from Micah. She doesn’t want to get home and find that her mother is out with Dave. She hates an empty apartment. She hates the silence of it. She can’t even drown out the silence with music, but she usually tries. She feels safe with Jack. She hopes that’s not weird to say.
It’s not weird. It makes Jack happy. He hasn’t felt happy in five years. He hasn’t had an Italian ice in five years. “You can come back to my place, if you want,” he says. “I have tea, coffee. I don’t sleep too well, so it’s not like I’m some old-timer who goes to bed at nine.”
“You sure?” Lily says. “I’d love that. I’d love the company.”
As they walk, they both keep an eye out for Micah. There’s been no sign of him so far. It’s scary to think he could be watching. It’s scary to think he’s holed up in a motel in Coney Island. It has to be the Luna Motel, but that’s the type of joint where prostitutes bring johns. Jack can’t picture this Westchester County psycho hiding out there. Maybe there’s a place he can’t think of, a new little motel tucked on the corner of some block he never goes down, but he doesn’t think so. He goes to Coney Island often on his walks. He likes to sit on the Boardwalk and watch the water, see the bodies mashed together on the beach. Gleaming, oiled bodies. The summer crowds. The voices. The whir of it all. The deadness in winter. The apocalypse feeling.
When they get back to his house, Jack can feel Lily taking it in. He can sense that she feels bad for him. He’s lost his wife and daughter and parents in the last decade. This ramshackle house is what’s left of his life. It’s like something from a fairy tale, where the house has come to resemble the state of his soul. Ravaged.
It’s dark inside. He turns on some lights. They pass through the living room to get to the kitchen. Lily looks at the pictures of Amelia and Janey that fill the walls, dust streaked on the glass in the frames. Janey on their honeymoon. Amelia, at seven, with a fishing pole down by Gravesend Bay. All of them together at Nellie Bly. All of them together at Coney Island, the Cyclone behind them. A dream of what was. The past laid out neatly. Pictures of his folks too. Their wedding. In front of St. Mary’s, a crisp fall day in 1955, a year he hadn’t known, wasn’t around for yet. He was almost in the world. Almost made.
He flicks the kitchen light on and invites Lily to sit at the table. She puts her bag down on the floor by the radiator and sits on the chair closest to the wall.
“You can smoke,” Jack says.
She thanks him.
“It’s a sad dump I live in, I know. You don’t have to stick around if it’s too much.”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” Lily says. “I was just thinking that it feels alive with memories.”
“There are a lot of memories, that’s true, but it’s dead every other way.” Jack goes over to the stove and puts the kettle on. “You want some tea?”
“Sure.”
“I have coffee too. And booze.” He grabs the half-empty bottle of Seagram’s Seven that’s on the counter and holds it up. “It’s not expensive stuff or anything.”
“Oh, wow,” Lily says. “I’ll take some of that.”
He shuts the gas and removes the kettle from the burner and then gets two highball glasses out of the cabinet over the sink, pouring whiskey for Lily and some for himself. The glasses are dusty. He can see that now. Everything in the house is dusty. “Ice?”
“Okay.”
He sets the glasses down on the table. He opens the freezer and breaks a few cubes from the tray. A loud snapping sound, as if the tray’s cracked. Jack’s always hated the noise of getting ice. It always rattles him. Always feels like one of the loneliest sounds in the world.
He brings over a handful of ice cubes, dropping two in her glass and two in his. He sits across from her. They clink glasses.
“I actually have a Seagram’s Seven story,” Lily says.
“I’m all ears,” Jack says.
“My second year of college, I bought this used car for five hundred bucks. It was a Volkswagen Fox. White. Stick. I couldn’t even drive stick before I bought that car, but I learned real fast. My friend drove it home for me. I stayed up all night that first night, just driving in parking lots and on back roads, learning how not to roll at stop signs, how not to burn out the clutch.”
“That’s impressive.”
“I have my moments.” She takes a drink. “It wasn’t that old, the car, but it had something like three hundred thousand miles on it. The previous owner had driven it back and forth across the country a bunch. So, the summer after my sophomore year, I get it in my head that I’m going to drive to the Grand Canyon. Alone. This wasn’t going to be a road trip with friends or anything. I was imagining just me in my new old car, windows down, radio on, shifting gears, seeing the country. My plan was to sleep in the car, maybe camp out.”
Jack knows that Amelia was probably only a few months away from the desire to make trips like that. It hit most people around her age, the need to be out on the road, to see all of the country. He wishes she’d had the chance. He would’ve worried, but that’s life. She should’ve had the chance.
Lily continues: “So, right after classes ended for the semester, I started packing and planning. I left the next week. I had two bags of clothes in my trunk. A cheap tent. Lots of granola bars. Some tapes—this car had a tape player. I also brought a bottle of Seagram’s Seven. Someone had given it to me, this girl Andrea I used to know. She’d stolen it from the liquor store where she worked to bring to a party but then didn’t go to the party. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a bottle of whiskey. I imagined sitting around a campfire in a national park, making new friends, sharing the bottle. I’d just read Into the Wild.”
Jack likes that Lily seems to assume he knows what book she’s talking about.
“Anyhow,” Lily says, swishing the ice around in her glass, “I made it into Ohio and my car broke down. It was the middle of the night, and I was on this deserted stretch of highway. I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a payphone anywhere. I didn’t have a cell. No one was passing to flag down, and I don’t think I would’ve done that anyway. I was lucky I was able to get the car over to the side of the road behind some tree cover. I’m not even sure how I managed it. I crawled into the back seat and I found that bottle of Seagram’s Seven. I’d brought along this little Gettysburg shot glass someone had given me too. I kept pouring shots for myself. I don’t even know how many I did. Maybe seven or eight. I’ve never blacked out so fast. I woke up the next day around noon, sweating because I hadn’t opened any windows, with this monster headache. Whatever was left of the Seagram’s Seven spilled on the floor. That’s it. That’s my great story.”
“What happened with the trip?” Jack asks.
“I didn’t make it. I hitched to a rest stop and called my mom and she gave me the Triple A information. I got towed to a garage. The mechanic said I needed a new engine. My mom had to come all the way to Ohio—she got there at nine that night—and helped me unload my stuff. I junked the car.”
Jack’s thinking about Lily’s sense of adventure. To him, just the fact that she wanted to do something like that—especially alone—speaks to some great nobility of character. A lot of people, they’d be too afraid. They’d get hung up on everything that could go wrong, like breaking down in Nowheresville, Ohio in the middle of the night. They’d shrivel at the thought of being alone with all these mistakes you don’t even know you’re going to make.
Jack asks if he can show Lily some of Amelia’s writing. She says she’d love to see it. He goes up to Amelia’s room and gets the first few pages of her novel. No one else—not that he knows of anyway—has ever read any of this. Maybe a couple of Amelia’s friends from Fontbonne, but he doubts it. She was secretive about her work. He only read it for the first time the week before. It feels good to be able to share it with someone who knows her stuff, someone who will recognize the talent that was lost.
When he gets back, he pours more whiskey for Lily and hands her the pages. “I don’t want to overwhelm you,” he says. “That’s just the start of this book she was working on.”
Lily reads the pages. She pauses once to take a sip of whiskey. She seems wrapped up in Amelia’s words. “This is so good,” she says. “She was really talented, especially for eighteen.”
“That means a lot. She would’ve liked your class.”
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely.”
“How much more of this is there?”
“Not a lot. Maybe fifteen pages. She also wrote some stories for school.”
“I’d like to read it all some other time, maybe when I haven’t had a few drinks.”
Jack nods. “That’d be great.”
Lily takes out her cigarettes and lights one. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not.”
Lily puffs smoke at the ceiling. She’s a natural smoker. She has the posture for it, the angles. Some people look all wrong with a cigarette. They hold it strangely. They slump. They make a mess of looking cool. Lily looks cool, like she’s in an old movie. That makes Jack realize that she does, in fact, have some of the qualities of a classic actress. He’s thinking Lauren Bacall or Lizabeth Scott. Something in her voice—her halted, determined way of speaking—but also her look. He imagines her being interviewed on some talk show about the novel she’s written, picking tobacco from her lip, blowing smoke away from the camera. She’s hard and gruff and yet lovely.
“The food at the Roulette was particularly bad tonight,” Jack says. “You hungry at all? I don’t have much, but I could make you a sandwich if you want.”
“I don’t have much of an appetite,” she says, alternating between her smoke and her whiskey. “But thanks.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask this, but do you have plans for what’s next? Are you sticking around the neighborhood? Are you moving?” He’s asking because, selfishly, he hopes that she’ll be around for a while. There’s the class to look forward to, sure, but he also feels like they’re building a friendship that will endure beyond that.
“Oh, boy. I really don’t know. I feel so lost since I graduated. I wish that were all I had to deal with, but the Micah thing on top of it is too much. I don’t know about next moves. Next moves freak me out. I can only plan about six hours ahead at the most.” She laughs.
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“I know I’m writing,” Lily goes on. “That’s the only thing I know. I’m putting in the time. I’m getting words down. It’s been harder in the last week, but I’m keeping at it. You’re a talented writer, Jack. Really. I’ve got some talent too, but you’ve got experience behind what you’re saying, which is something I just don’t have yet. Not enough anyway. I’m okay with sentences and I’ve written some good stories, but I haven’t lived enough. I keep trying to live more but I can’t quite figure it out. I don’t know if I’ll have the chops to finish my novel or to teach writing for a living. I guess I should go to grad school.”
“You’re a really good teacher,” Jack says.
She blushes and thanks him. “I’m sorry for talking so much about myself.”
“I asked.”
“I feel like I know Amelia now, but can I ask you more about your wife? Janey, right?”
He hasn’t heard someone else say her name in so long. He goes into the living room and gets the picture from their honeymoon, showing it to Lily. They hadn’t gone far on their honeymoon, just a small inn on the Jersey Shore. It was the off-season and they spent their time wandering around on empty beaches and eating good meals and tangled up together in bed. “Here she is,” Jack says, tracing his finger over her smiling face behind the glass. She’s wearing a white sweater and blue jeans. He remembers the exact moment he snapped the picture. He’d said something silly to get her to smile. It worked. They’d just come from an Irish pub where they’d had a great lunch.
“She’s so pretty,” Lily says.
“She had this light shining from her. All the time. She cheered up every room she was in. She used to volunteer at nursing homes. She’d go sit with these old-timers—some of them were miserable, abandoned by their families, really and truly on their own—and she’d come in with a deck of cards and they’d just feel it right away. She brought happiness with her.”
Lily looks like she might cry.
“You okay?” Jack asks.
“Yeah, it’s just nice to hear you talk like that about your wife.” She pauses and a tear does fall down her cheek. She catches it with the heel of her free hand and lets out another little laugh. She takes a drag off her cigarette. “I’m sorry. Whiskey makes me prone to crying. Do you have an ashtray?”
Jack gets an old Atlantic City mug from over the sink and says it’ll have to do.
Lily taps her cigarette into the mug, her long ash crumbling instantly. “I’m so sorry,” Lily says.
“Sorry why?”
“Sorry you lost Janey and Amelia.”
“We all lose people. I’m sorry you lost your dad.”
“It’s clichéd, I know, but it really seems like the only people we lose are the good ones. All these bad people out there keep right on chugging along.”
“It does feel like that.”
Jack can’t remember the last time he talked to anyone like this. Not even Amelia. Not really. She was still a teenager when she died. Though he didn’t outwardly irritate her and they rarely fought, she was still angsty, detached, and secretive. They didn’t really sit down and have big conversations about life. He tried, especially after Janey died, but Amelia was even younger then and he hit a brick wall with her. He’s also probably better now at articulating his own thoughts than he was five years ago or ten years ago. He’s had nothing but time to sit with them, to reflect.
“Like Micah,” Lily says. “He’ll probably live until he’s ninety. He’s a demon that’s been feeding in the darkness for the last couple of years, waiting for me to come home. In the meantime, there are probably good people everywhere dying. Kids with cancer who never really got a chance to live. People who feed the homeless. Whatever. But Micah makes it his life mission, suddenly, to hunt me. It’s not even like we just broke up. It’s been two years.” She pauses. “I swear, I should’ve known from day one. You know what his favorite record was? Hootie & the Blowfish, Cracked Rear View. That’s some American Psycho shit.”
Jack considers telling her about what he was doing on the side before Amelia died, his revenge business. He’s never told anyone before. He knows he can trust her. He knows he can be open with her. He wants to tell her because it’s a service he can provide to help her. He can find and take care of this Micah, no charge.
But he doesn’t say anything. She shouldn’t have to live with that knowledge. Plus, it’ll change everything between them. This nice talk they’ve had, this evening of feeling alive for the first time in forever, it’ll come to a grinding halt. “Wait, what? You killed people for a living?” she’d say. “Are you offering to kill Micah?” She’d see the house differently. She’d think of him as a hired killer, not a surrogate dad. Maybe it wouldn’t bother her at all. Maybe she’d feel a great sense of relief. Maybe she’d say, “Yes, please take care of Micah. Please, before things get even scarier.” Maybe. Probably not. Probably she’d be freaked out. Probably she’d feel unsafe. Probably she’d run screaming from his kitchen.
