The Moonlight Man (11 page)

“He didn't notice me,” she said.

“Don't simper,” he said. “Why shouldn't he notice you? The thing is—he's coming back to drive us around this evening when he goes off duty.”

“Drive us around where?”

“A few places he thought would be interesting,” he replied evasively.

She didn't press him; she was afraid of what he might tell her. If he intended to go to bootleggers, she understood that she couldn't prevent him from doing so. The tenderness she knew he felt toward her did not alter a hardness of purpose in him where his own wish was concerned. She had not known that drinking could carry you out of reach of your own feelings for people. She hadn't known anything about drinking. But she felt she must say something that would let him know what was on her mind.

“You didn't tell me you kept the Lamb's rum.”

“I'm not obliged to make reports to you,” he said flatly. “In any event, rum is not my drink. It's for visitors.”

She didn't look at him as she asked for the car keys so she could drive to Mackenzie to telephone her mother. She didn't want to see his face.

“Say hello to her for me,” he said neutrally.

She wouldn't.

The public telephone in the village was on the wall of a narrow lunchroom that smelled of ketchup and stale coffee. She felt sad and disheartened and disgruntled as she asked the operator to put through a collect call. The one waitress behind the counter handed a hamburger as thin as a wafer to a man in workclothes.

When she heard her mother's eager voice accepting the charges, her spirits rose. “Oh! I'm so glad you're home!” she exclaimed.

“What's the matter? Is anything the matter?” her mother asked, her voice filled with alarm.

“No, no. I'm just glad to hear you,” Catherine said. “I was afraid you might have already started back to work, and that switchboard operator in your office wouldn't have accepted the charges—” She broke off. Why was she having to explain everything? “I'm fine,” she said, “really great. How was your trip?”

“Marvelous. I've got so much to tell you and show you. We took hundreds of pictures. How was Toronto?”

“Toronto?” asked Catherine, her mind blank. Then she remembered. “Oh, Toronto. Pretty nice. Not as nice as here.”

“I'm so happy you'll be home soon.”

“Yes,” agreed Catherine.

“Yes? Yes, what? Catherine, you sound—”

“I'm happy, too,” Catherine broke in hastily.

“Is he behaving himself?” her mother asked, her voice grim.

Would her mother ever stop prosecuting the case against her father? Did she want a chorus of ten thousand voices crying out that she had been the only injured party? Right now, her father was licking his chops, everything drained out of his head except for the thought of moonshine liquor. Her wayward parents!

But she realized, if only fleetingly, that it had been hard for her mother to let her spend this time with Mr. Ames. If she knew he had kept Catherine waiting for three weeks!

“Mom, he's being really fine. He cooks terrific meals. We've been all over the place. I'm really okay. Mom?”

Driving back to the house, thinking of how she had calmed her mother's self-serving fears, she felt exiled to a chilly place, far from those parents of hers.

Six

Catherine, washing supper dishes, saw a rabbit through the kitchen window. Suddenly it dropped down on all fours and fled. Macbeth walked out of the lingering sunlight and into the shadow of the peaked roof that nearly reached the railroad tracks. Even as she pronounced his name, she heard the door bang shut.

He came down the hall and into the kitchen, her father leading him. He looked like a child dressed up for an occasion, in a tight tweed jacket and a yellow necktie.

“Evening,” he said to her shyly. She nodded.

“Come into the parlor while my staff finishes up in here,” her father said jovially. She felt a flash of resentment. His joking was a part of their private conversation. In front of a stranger, the joke was stripped of affection. She heard only his words, and they seemed derisive and harsh.

She didn't want to go anywhere with Macbeth. She had asked Mr. Ames if she could stay home. “I want you with us,” he had said. It wasn't his words that prevented her from arguing it out with him. She had sensed uneasiness in his voice in the way he looked at her, as though he were afraid.

She had wanted to ask him about his writing that evening, although she hadn't figured out how to bring it up. She knew it was a thorny subject.

Her mother had kept a copy of his first novel in a row of cookbooks on a kitchen shelf. Several years ago, Catherine had taken it off to her room. Her mother had found her reading it at her desk, her school books pushed aside.

“You'd better do your homework,” she commented.

Catherine didn't answer. She rarely responded to her mother's remarks about her father. She had held onto the book, not looking up. Her mother said, sharply, that he had written a second novel but it wasn't any good. The first one was all right—but then his true character had caught up with him. Despite herself, Catherine couldn't help asking what that was? Her mother looked confused, as though she hadn't expected to have to explain what she meant. She picked up a jacket Catherine had dropped on the floor and began to fold it like a towel.

“He thinks being hopeless about life is romantic, deep,” her mother said. “That's what's wrong with his books.”

“Is he hopeless?” Catherine asked.

“It's a pose.”

“Then you mean—he's not really hopeless?” Catherine asked relentlessly.

Her mother dropped the jacket on a chair. “Oh—I don't know,” she said agitatedly. “He baffled me so.…”

It was, Catherine had thought at the time, nearly the only kind thing her mother had ever said about her father.

The novel related the adventure of a young man who got a job as a cabin boy on a tramp steamer going to South America. She read it to hear her father's voice. It was the first time since she had learned to read that she realized a real, living person had written a book.

She had spent months poking around in second-hand book stores. At last, in the basement of one of them, a place that smelled of dust and stale paper and decay, she found his second novel. It was just over one hundred pages long. It ended so abruptly, so mysteriously, it was as though the writer had dropped his manuscript and left town forever. The story began with a terrible accident. A man was hit by a train. He had walked a mile before he collapsed and died. The life in him had not recognized its time was up. Some earlier reader than Catherine had underlined a sentence on the last page:
We want to keep on living even as we are ground to dust
.

She found his travel books everywhere. In them were listed places to eat and stay, bits of history about castles and town halls and notable personalities, written in a tone of hard-boiled commercial cheerfulness, as though the main object of visiting other countries was to find good room service and good plumbing. “For
arrivistes,”
he had told her, “people who only want to know about the most expensive restaurants and hotels.”

She heard him now in the parlor. He was speaking in a loud, hearty voice; it had in it an insistence that everything was about to be wonderful.

“Get a jacket or something, Cath,” he called to her as she went down the hall to the stairs. “Macbeth says there's a touch of autumn in the air.” Telling her to get something to keep herself warm was one of the few ways in which he behaved like a parent, she noted. Then she thought—autumn! They had only a few days left!

As Catherine joined them in the parlor, Macbeth was saying, “Please, Mr. Ames, call me Alistair.”

“Actually, I think of it as a privilege to call you Macbeth.”

“From the play by William Shakespeare,” Catherine said, with a touch of grimness.

“‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know,'” recited Macbeth in a schoolboy's singsong voice.

“By God!” exclaimed Mr. Ames. “You're a barrel of surprises, Macbeth!”

“I read it in school. We had to memorize bits,” said Macbeth modestly.

It was
she
who had been patronizing, she realized. Until that moment, she had thought her father's obscure allusions had been a kind of showing off to himself, showing himself how much he knew that other people didn't. But thinking back to the time they'd spent with Reverend Ross, with Mr. Conklin and Farmer Glimm, and, of course, with Mrs. Landy, she guessed that they hadn't felt patronized at all. He didn't think he was superior because of what he knew. She did. Ashamed, she went to him. He put his arm around her. “My dear,” he said, his voice surprised.

Macbeth drove a small English car. Catherine curled up in the back seat. There wasn't enough room for her legs, so she had to squeeze herself up like an accordion. Mr. Ames didn't stop talking for one moment. There was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice that must, Catherine imagined, make the little car glow like a coal as they drove through the countryside upon which night had now fallen.

Macbeth turned onto a dirt road. The car shuddered and bounced and clattered. A few hundred yards ahead of them, Catherine could see a cluster of dim lights. Macbeth parked. They sat in silence for a moment or two. “Interesting,” Mr. Ames said in a subdued voice. What on earth was he really thinking? she wondered.

“Well, you walk right over there to the barn,” Macbeth said. “Tell them Alistair sent you.”

“Not Macbeth?” asked Mr. Ames, already half out of the car.

“Oh, no,” Macbeth replied. “Don't say my last name. They know who it is, but I only use Macbeth when it's an official visit. When I have to close them down, do you see?”

“Strange distinction,” Mr. Ames commented, staring at Catherine. “Take note. It's an example of the social contract.”

“Not really,” she muttered. He seemed not to have heard her. She watched him walk away, saw his shadow loom against the barn door.

“What's in there?” she asked.

“It's a fellow does a little bootlegging. A potato farmer who earns a bit of money that way.”

“A still, you mean?”

“That's right. In the line of work I know about these places.” He turned toward her. She smelled his mint-flavored breath.

“But it's illegal. Don't you arrest bootleggers?” she asked. She felt helpless, crouched there behind him.

“Yes, I do arrest them. Not on my time off, though. After a while, they start up all over again. It's the laws that are wrong. The farmers know they can be arrested, and they know some judge could make it hard for them. They're poor people mostly. They need the extra money.”

“What about when they don't need extra money?”

‘I don't know about that,” he replied indifferently. “Your father was saying he might write a book about us here, about Nova Scotia, and that's why he wanted to know about the bootlegging. Get the flavor of the place—so to speak.”

She squeezed herself tighter into the seat. What a fool Macbeth was! Chewing a mint to make himself sweet, putting on his buttercup tie—didn't he know what was up? Would he believe her if she shouted at him that her father was on a tear, that he wanted to drink up every still for miles around?

“I've got to get out of this back seat. I feel like a pretzel,” she said.

He was quick to help her out, gripping her wrist with his warm, hard hand. She was being unfair to him. Her father was making everything turn bad.

They stood silently in the moist air. He lit a cigarette. Only the blurred light from the barn showed there was anyone else abroad in the night. There wasn't any noise coming from there at all.

“You go to school here in Canada?” Macbeth whispered.

“Yes,” she answered loudly. She wanted the bootlegger to know there was someone out here. The barn door opened; a ray of light fell on the ground. She saw her father coming back. She got into the car at once.

“Fascinating!” Mr. Ames said expansively. “What an extraordinary process! It's been going on forever, of course. I wonder if you know, Macbeth, that in Sweden there's a limit on profits you can make from liquor. Ethically sound but absolutely senseless.”

Macbeth nodded but said nothing as they drove to the tarmac road.

“I hope you got a sample,” Catherine said.

“Indeed, I did,” replied Mr. Ames quickly. “And delicious it was. I had to test the product … quite a bit like gasoline, I imagine.”

“Cranshaw's new at it,” Macbeth said apologetically.

“All the same to me, lad,” said Mr. Ames with an easy laugh.

They drove down other rough roads. Once Catherine was flung up and hit her head on the roof.

“I beg your pardon,” said Macbeth.

“Ow!” cried her father in a falsetto voice.

How she hated them both!

As they waited for Mr. Ames outside a large shed, rain began to fall. Macbeth tried once more to engage her in conversation. “Where is your school?” he asked.

“Montreal,” she replied, and not a word more.

The enmity she felt toward him, unjust as she knew it to be, had the effect of making her feel as old as he was. She heard him sigh. She didn't feel a touch of sympathy for him. He was a country cop who now and then arrested a farmer. He was someone her father was making a fool of.

Yet she felt a contrary emotion; she wanted to apologize to him, to tell him everything. They were nearly the same age. Her father was an old pirate. They might just drive off and leave him in that shed with the still and the bootlegger. Let him talk to the bootlegger about social contracts!

Mr. Ames returned. He got into the car, talking. His arms waved. For Macbeth's benefit, she guessed, he told the story of the man who lived in a lighthouse, the one whose appendix had burst. But he changed the ending. The man walked eight miles only to die on the steps of a village post office. She was as shocked as though she'd known that man, and her father had betrayed him, killed him.