Black Moon (24 page)

“He’s lying,”
his echo said.

But the sleepless heard only the word “toxic.” It burrowed in and their fear pulled them back. They wiped desperately at their faces, their necks, wherever he had struck them with the manure, spitting and gagging.

“You are so fucking inappropriate!” someone said.

A woman pointed at his groin. “Look how it arouses him to be so vile like a dog!”

“Oh my crap it’s true look at that gearshift there so jutting!”

Chase continued to scoop up the shit pellets and sidearm them at his tormentors. But they had moved back, out of range, even though he charged at them and leaned far out over the racks. “We are toxic!” he yelled. “Don’t come touching us!”

“He sleeps!”
the echo shouted.

“Now who’s lying?” Chase said. But he didn’t yell this. He didn’t want a response. He sat back, his legs splayed out. The sheep was next to him. It wasn’t breathing right. Its side was rising and falling too quickly, Chase thought. Every now and then a little bubble of blood would form from one of its nostrils. It was panting. Chase pushed the animal’s pale tongue back into its mouth, clamped the mouth shut. He patted the sheep on the face, his fingers jabbing it in the eye. “I won’t let them don’t worry,” he
whispered, gripping the animal’s ear and twisting it toward his mouth, so only the animal heard. So it was just between the two of them. “They aren’t going to get to do anything.”

He lay back hard against it, knocking the wind out of the dying animal.

THEY
came several times in the night for the sheep. Each time he was able to fend off the insomniacs by screaming and throwing sheep shit scooped off the floor. Sometimes he remembered to say his line about the animal, both of them, being afflicted with some kind of toxic disease. Other times he just savagely lashed out at the vague figures that emerged from the darkness, edging in from the boundaries of his vision. He kicked up at them as they closed in, but his feet never made contact and they vanished when he squinted and focused.

In the darkening plain he saw bonfires burning and he was envious of the light and heat. The temperature had dropped as night descended. There were matches in the front pocket of the waders, he knew, but what would he light? Maybe just one leg of the sheep like a torch. He sat shivering in his T-shirt and waders, listening to the murmur of voices, which was sometimes punctuated by shouts and screams—an eruption of unseen conflict. He sensed that a black moon had risen, a sphere of sleeplessness that pulled at the tides of blood—an invisible explanation for the madness welling inside.

Once in the night, his eyes sought out the source of a terrible far-off shriek. He saw a figure cloaked in fire rushing into the darkness of the prairie. He stood and watched as it suddenly dropped out of view, wondering if the burning figure was the source of his echo. The sheep was still in the dark corner, its breathing a wheezing rasp.

It occurred to him that he was in a bed. In bed with a sheep, sporting a hard-on. This realization triggered a fit of laughter that he couldn’t seem to kill. He roared with guffaws and his echo followed. Just as it seemed to be dying down, it would flutter back into his chest and he would shudder in waves. His maniacal spasm must have signaled a lapse in his defenses since, during this fit, he was rushed by a number of people—men, women, and children. They swarmed the truck, climbed up over the racks. Some came bounding over the hood and onto the cab. They threw themselves down at him. He was knocked to the floor and a mob piled on top of him, crushing him under their squirming bodies. He kicked and ripped at anything he could close his hands around. He gouged at any opening his fingers found. Through the flailing limbs, he saw his sheep lifted, swept up and over the rack by a raging current of hands. He screamed until a knee smashed into his mouth. A desperate, raging strength rose in him and he kicked and squirmed until he found an opening in the thicket of limbs. He rolled off the tailgate onto the hood of the car he had hit earlier. He kept rolling until his legs dropped over the side and his feet found the ground. He growled and bulldozed his way though the people jumping down from the bed, bowling them over and stomping them as he made his way to the cab, where he grabbed the hatchet from behind the seat.

Then he was running through the maze of tightly packed cars looking for his sheep. He called out, “Bring back that animal that is mine!”

His echo was still laughing.

He overtook a man in his path and swung at him, driving the blade of the hatchet into the man’s shoulder. The man screamed, his hand going to the deep wound. Chase tugged at the tool, freeing the blade from bone, and swung again as the man tumbled
to the side, scrambling to get away from his attacker. The swing caught him on the forearm, opening an angry gash. The man fell away with a groan.

He charged into the dark campsites, stepping on people who were sitting on the ground, hacking wildly at their heads and bodies, knocking down their fragile shelters as he stomped through. The sleepless yelled after him, tried to hold him back, but he plowed ahead. He brought the small ax down on the back of a woman who ducked before him, throwing her arms over her head. She yelped under the blow—like a dog’s bark—as he stormed onward, hearing with satisfaction her ragged inhalation, shattered ribs gouging her lungs.

Chase imitated the sound she let out when he struck her. “Bark, bark, bark!”

“So funny!”
his echo said.

He charged a group that had gathered around a fire. “The animal is mine!” he yelled. Chaos opened up before him as people panicked. He swung at the scrambling bodies, catching a man in the face, knocking his jaw askew. Teeth flew, blood in a warm spray, the handle of the hatchet getting slick. Hard to grip as he caught an elderly man in the head. The hatchet stuck in the man’s skull, and when the man hit the ground, Chase kicked frantically at his head to free it.

Someone broke something over his head and he staggered, his legs wobbling under him. He could feel that there was a wound. When he touched it, he felt a strange pressure in his teeth. A delayed rush of pain exploded over him. Hands from a swarm of shouts grabbed at him from behind, but he was too slick to hold. He tore away.

The blow had robbed him of his sense of direction. He stumbled aimlessly, head ducked low and arms raised, waiting for more assaults. He kicked and swung at every nearby voice or
moving form, sometimes connecting and setting off screams. But as he wandered on, the chaos quickly receded behind him. Only twenty feet farther on and it was as if nothing had happened. He saw that this was a new world. A kind of dark heaven, a world without consequence.

In the flickering light of a nearby fire, he caught the profile of his father. What was he doing here? He’s supposed to be teaching in Boston. Chase approached him and said, “I had sheep and the one that was the only one left has been taken by these people here.”

“They will send helicopters,” his father told him, “and you’ll see all this come to life, rising on ropes when that wind hits. What’s that angry thing I’m seeing there?”

Chase put his hand over himself, but his father was pointing at the hatchet.

Chase held it up so he could see it better. His father frowned.

“You better hand it over to me with your own hand.”

Chase surrendered it. “Remember what happened to Jordan with the hammer he was swinging at the slugs he was making?” he asked his father. “That’s how he lost his eye when it shattered into pieces against the concrete floor and shot like bullets right through his eyelid closing them didn’t matter.”

“I could use this,” his father said, “for the stripping of the branches so we can see the road from here when the tanks come.”

It was not his father from the front or back, only from the side. He could see that now as the man pulled away and wandered off. Chase followed him with his eyes, thinking the almost familiar will somehow lead him to the familiar. And it worked. He spotted Felicia, moving through the darkness. She turned and, seeing him over her shoulder, gestured for him to follow. He was pleased to see that she had no wounds and that, in his activities, he had not axed her.

But she disappeared behind a shaft of darkness, then was nowhere to be seen. He wandered forward, calling for her, until he found himself at the concrete heart of the rest stop, standing before the cinderblock bathroom buildings. He peered into the complete darkness of the men’s room. An animal sound, one he attributed to the strangling of a sheep, seemed to emanate from inside. He yelled into hard space: “Felicia?”

“No, just me,”
his echo responded.

Chase stepped inside to find people there, standing in the darkness or huddled on the floor. The tiled floor and walls amplified their murmurs so that the space buzzed with a hivelike hum. He stepped carefully around people, men and women, he could tell. Animals somewhere, too. He thought he heard the panting of large dogs and smelled the sour odor of wet fur, though it was soon overpowered by the smell of urine, the funk of shit.

His eyes slowly adjusted, helped only a little by the feeble light coming in from the high windows over the row of sinks. He could see his vague form moving from mirror to mirror, like a man passing behind a wall of windows, as he walked down the long row of toilet stalls. The floor was wet under his rubber-booted feet. Probably piss from the pissers, he figured. Yet the stain of fluid coming from under one of the far stall doors was dark. He could see the fat line it made on the tiles, running down the gently sloping floor and into a drain.

Chase was drawn to it. He had to move forward, toward it, pulled by some strange new strand of momentum—a thin tether, yet one charged with an absence of self. He was growing distant from that core he had always felt so compelled to protect, to hold tightly together. He was aware that the dark form moving in the mirrors was no longer his responsibility. He was the opposite of all that he had been. He had been turned inside out.

He stepped over the long stain on the floor. It looked black in the light but he recognized it as blood. Listening at the door, he heard voices, sounds—maybe sex, maybe whimpering. He imagined his whole world behind the door: his family, Felicia, Jordan, his sheep, every escaped prisoner, gangbanger, or psycho killer he had imagined, every monster, human or otherwise, blood draining out of all of them. All crammed into the small space. Did he belong in there with them? He pushed against the door with his shoulder. It was latched shut.

He found himself in the next stall, sitting on the toilet in his waders. In the darkness, he remembered the matches and dug them out of the large front pocket. It took a long time to light one. His hands were shaky and he found it difficult to focus on the simple task. Eventually, one lit with a spark and a hiss and he was able to see that the walls of the stall were covered with graffiti. Pornographic boasts and invitations, sappy sentiments and proclamations of love. Filthy rhymes. Cock-and-balls etchings like some kind of ancient religious symbol. But most striking was the elaborate butterfly drawn on the wall to his left—the wall connected to the stall from which the blood drained. It had the wingspan of an owl and its wings were ornamented with eyes. The butterfly’s head, from which sprang long, wiry antennae, was a dark circle. In fact it was a glory hole that someone had bored through to the neighboring stall.

As the flame crept down the match, Chase leaned forward. He peered through the small portal and was confronted, as the flame bit at his fingers, with an eye staring back at him. Startled, he tossed the match on the floor, but not before glimpsing the wide black hole of the pupil ringed with green. The eye of his echo, he knew. Glistening and open, unblinking in that instant he found it, before the match flame flitted out, leaving him again in darkness.

He felt it watching him, so he jabbed his fingers through the hole, hoping to spear it. Nothing. The eye, he sensed, was just out of reach. He slapped a hand over the hole and, with his other, worked down the waders over that engorged part of himself—that persistent spike—so that they bunched stiffly around his knees. Now he would reach the eye, and blind it. He moved into position, keeping one hand over the hole.

To hear it scream, he knew, he had to scream first.

IT TOOK ONLY HALF A DAY’S DISTANCE
from the warehouse, walking through abandoned industrial parks and wide expanses of dry brush toward the foothills, for Biggs to conclude that he still slept, still dreamed. The insomniac had died on his own. The man was at the end of his rope already, and all the activity pushed him over the edge. The rage caused something inside him to snap. Broke his jaw throwing himself against the cage or the floor. Then blew a fuse and that was that.

And the ring? It was Maria who had given it back to him, he had always suspected. Slipped it onto his finger as a gesture of goodwill—a refund since, after all, he didn’t require her services. Or maybe an exchange for his wallet, which was missing when he woke up.

He tested his syntax by saying, “I can still sleep, and dream.”