Low Red Moon (13 page)

“I think Scary Larry would be more accurate.”

“Yeah, well, get this. He actually told her that whites were created separately in the Garden of Eden, that blacks are the children of Cain, and teaching evolution leads to miscegenation.”

“I doubt he can even spell ‘miscegenation.’”

Alice laughs and presses the soles of both her tennis shoes against the side of Chance’s desk. “When you’re one of God’s chosen people, I don’t think it much matters whether or not you can spell.”

“Then maybe there’s hope for me yet,” Chance says and reaches for the paperback
Merriam-Webster’s
on her cluttered desk.

“So you’re going to be okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, whether it’s true or not, because it’s what Alice wants to hear. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I just didn’t need that creationist crap today.”

“Good,” Alice replies, getting up from the floor. “Let me know when you’re finished in here, and I’ll give you a ride home, okay?”

“Thanks, but I have the car. As soon as I finish with these corrections and get this ready to go back in the mail, I’m out of here.”

“Okay. But be careful, and don’t you wait around here for Scary Larry to show up. He told Joan he was going to drop, too, but he never did. He took an F instead. I expect he’ll do the same with you.”

“I’ll call you tonight,” Chance says. “I promise,” and she manages a weary smile.

“You do that, Momma Bear,” Alice tells her, and then she leaves Chance alone with her red pen and galley pages, her Kleenex and self-doubt. Chance leans back in her chair and stares at the office door, at the defiled
Calvin and Hobbes
strip and a postcard from her visit to the Yale Peabody Museum taped up next to it. She tries in vain to recall the world before she met Alice Sprinkle, or a world without her, and in a few minutes she gives up and goes back to work.

In the dream, and he knows that it’s a dream, Deacon is standing in the doorway of Soda’s apartment, watching while the blonde woman undresses. Soda’s sitting in the center of the bed, sitting there cross-legged in nothing but a dirty pair of navy-blue boxers and a smile, talking his white-boy shit, the king of the goddamn world, Mr. Smooth, and if this were not only a dream, Deacon would try to warn him. If he knew, instead, that he was wide awake and these moments were not already history, he would tell Soda about the knife. If he were awake, he would tell Soda lots of things. But Soda is already dead, sliced and diced, decapitated and carted away to the city morgue, where the police pathologists have already had their turns at his corpse. Soda is already evidence of the murder that still hasn’t happened in this dream, this now inside his brain, and Deacon sits down on a wobbly chair near the door and watches.

“Hey, man,” Soda shouts at him. “Were you raised in a fuckin’ barn or what? Shut the goddamn door!” So Deacon closes the door, and the latch clicks loud, like someone cocking a gun on TV.

“Maybe I’ll leave a few scraps for you, dawg,” Soda says and grins at Deacon, showing off his crooked yellow teeth.

“I’m a married man now,” Deacon says. “But thanks, anyway.”

“Oh, hell,” Soda giggles. “You ain’t that married, bro. Ain’t nobody with a dick
that
married.”

Deacon knows this is a dream because his migraine has stopped.

The tall woman unbuttons her blouse, and Soda’s drooling like a kid waiting for the ice-cream truck; her long fingers with their long unpolished nails work the buttons one after another, bottom to top, and her belly is as flat and smooth and white as milk.

“Oh yeah,” Soda says, “That’s what I want to see,” and Deacon reaches for the bottle of Jack on the floor beside the chair. He breaks the paper seal, twists the cap off, but when he raises it to his lips, he realizes that there’s nothing inside but sand. Sand that smells like the sea, and he thinks if he were to put the mouth of the bottle to his ear he would hear waves crashing against the shore, somewhere far away.

“Have you ever seen the moon bleed?” the woman asks Soda, and he nods his head enthusiastically, still grinning that stupid grin.

“I’ll see whatever you want me to see, baby.”

“Have you ever seen it red and swollen and hanging so low above the world you could reach out and brush it with the tips of your fingers?”

Her voice like satin and rust, and “Baby, I’ll say I seen Elvis and the Pope scootin’ around in a goddamn flyin’ saucer, if that’s what you wanna hear.”

Deacon sets the bottle of beach sand back down on the mangy gray-green carpet. “Dude, peep this,” Soda says, as the woman slips her blouse off her shoulders and it falls to the floor. There’s a stiff mane of short blonde hair running from the base of her neck all the way to the waistband of her jeans.

“Maybe I should go now,” Deacon says, and Soda laughs and shakes his head.

“Hell no,” he says. “This shit’s just gettin’ interesting. You know you gotta stick around. You gotta see what this fine bitch is gonna do next.”

If the woman knows that Deacon’s watching them, she’s chosen to ignore him. Her yellow eyes on Soda and nothing else, ghost of a smile on her full red lips, and Deacon tries to remember if he’s ever seen anyone with yellow eyes before.

“When I was a little girl,” the woman says and steps out of her jeans, “the moon came down from the sky and scraped itself raw against the sharp edges of the horizon. When I was a little girl, the moon bled for me.” Now Deacon can see that the stiff mane runs all the way to the base of her spine, where it ends in a whitish tuft of hair. A single tattoo on each side of her ass, black ink and shades of gray against her pale skin, unfamiliar runes or ideograms, and Deacon tries to memorize them because they might be important later.

“Is that a fact?” Soda says, his eyes on her breasts, her hard brown nipples. “That must’a been a sight to see.”

“She gets lonely, so far away,” and now the woman’s reaching for the knife tucked into the leather sheath strapped around her left thigh. “It’s cold in Heaven. Cold and dark, and the stars are farther away than God.”

“Show me,” Soda whispers, and there’s a sound from directly overhead, something heavy dragged slowly across a floor, something rolled end over end, and Deacon glances up at the ceiling. There are dozens of stains blooming on the cracked and sagging plaster, opening themselves like red-brown roses, living flowers pressed flat by the weight the woman carries in her soul. One of the stains begins to drip, and soon the others follow its example.

“You don’t have the eyes to see such things,” the woman says, “not yet,” and opens her mouth very wide, and at first Deacon thinks that she’s only yawning. Her teeth like polished ivory, white daggers in her pink gums, lion yawn, hyena yawn, and now there’s so much of the red shit dripping from the ceiling of Soda’s apartment that Deacon’s getting wet and wishing he’d thought to dream an umbrella.

Upstairs, men and women laugh softly among themselves, the clink of glasses and there’s orchestra music, and the dragging, rolling sound grows suddenly louder. The blonde woman draws her knife, and it flicks open in a flash of silver fire before she slices Soda’s throat. More surprise in his wide eyes than either fear or pain, and dark blood dribbles from the corners of his mouth to stain the sheets.

“Now, you’re a different story, Deacon Silvey,” the woman says softly, turning away from Soda gasping and strangling on the bed. “You have vision an oracle would envy. You can see all the way down to the rotten heart of creation.”

“I never asked for it,” Deacon says, unable to look away, the sticky rain from the ruined ceiling painting her pale flesh in streaks of crimson, her yellow eyes flashing red-orange in the gloom of Soda’s basement. “I never wanted it.”

“Do you think that matters?” she asks. “Do you really think I give a shit?”

“No,” he replies, and the phone begins to ring, but it’s all the way on the other side of the room. He’d have to walk past her to answer it, and never mind if this is only a dream, the phone can ring all night long before he takes one goddamned step closer to the woman with her burning eyes and stiletto fingers.

“You have a lovely wife, Deacon Silvey,” the woman growls with the voice of storms and hungry dogs, and he opens his eyes, then, awake in an instant, but the phone’s still ringing. His clothes and hair are drenched in a clammy, cold sweat, and his heart’s racing, his body bathed in the afternoon sunlight spilling warm across the bed. And his head’s pounding, the invisible railroad spike driven deep into his skull, so he knows for sure that he’s awake. Deacon shuts his eyes again, digs his fingers into Chance’s cornflower-blue comforter, hanging on, and in a minute or two the phone gives up and stops ringing.

Chance slows down and turns off Twenty-second onto Morris, trading asphalt for the bumpity cobblestones, and there’s Deacon walking past the Peanut Depot, Deacon in his black sunglasses, unshaved and his hair so wild and spiky he looks like a punk rocker or a crazy, homeless man. She honks the horn, and he stops beside a stack of burlap sacks filled with roasted peanuts, stops and glances behind him as if maybe the sound came from somewhere back there. Chance pulls over and parks the Impala directly across the street from him.

“Deacon!” she shouts from her open window, and his head snaps around again so that he’s staring straight at her, but still no evidence that he’s
seen
her, no hint of recognition on his stubbled face.
He looks lost,
she thinks, and then,
No, he looks drunk,
and the sudden, dizzy surge of fear and anger and adrenaline so strong her heart skips a beat, and the baby kicks sympathetically.

He takes one hesitant step in her direction, bumps into the burlap sacks and stops again. Chance curses, kills the engine and opens her door, unfastens her seat belt and wriggles out from behind the steering wheel. By the time she’s standing on the pavement, Deacon’s crossing the narrow street towards her.

“Where were you going?” she asks. “Why didn’t you answer the phone? I tried to call before I left campus.”

“I was just walking,” he replies and hooks his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. “I needed to get out of the apartment for a while, so I was just walking.”

“Have you been drinking, Deke?”

He takes a deep breath, then shakes his head very slowly and gazes past Chance at the car.

“There’s no point lying to me about it.”

“I’m not lying. If I want to get drunk, I’ll fucking get drunk. You know that.”

“Right,” she says and leans against the Impala, taking some of the weight off her feet. “I know that.”

“It’s my head. It’s bad, and I had a nightmare.”

“I tried to call you.”

“Yeah, the phone woke me up. But I didn’t get to it in time.”

“Jesus,” Chance whispers, feeling more ashamed of herself than relieved, and she looks down at Deacon’s feet because she can’t see her own; one of his black tennis shoes is untied. “I’m sorry. I was scared, that’s all. I had a really shitty day, and I shouldn’t have accused you—”

“No, I understand. I’ve definitely been
thinking
about getting drunk. I’ve been thinking about it long and hard. But I was only going for a walk.”

For a moment neither of them says anything. A train whistle wails, far off but coming closer, and a tall black man in overalls and a white T-shirt brings out another sack of peanuts and stacks it by the curb.

“I may have to do this thing,” Deacon says. “I don’t think I’m going to have any choice.”

Chance looks up, stares into the flat black lenses of his sunglasses. “Of course you have a choice,” she says. “You always have a choice, so don’t stand there and tell me that you don’t.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t see his body.”

“But you promised me, you
swore
you’d never get mixed up in this shit again.”

“I know what I said.”

“This isn’t your responsibility, Deke. That’s why we have policemen. Let them do their job.”

Deacon takes off his sunglasses and squints at her with his watery, bloodshot eyes.

“We aren’t going to argue about this, Chance,” he says. “Not this time.”

“Fine then, you do whatever the hell you want to do,” and she turns back to the car, better to get away from him now before she says something she won’t be able to apologize for later. She gets in and shuts the door, turns the key in the ignition, and the Impala grumbles reluctantly back to life.

“I’ll be home in a little while,” Deacon says. “I just need to walk,” and he puts the sunglasses on again.

“I’m not stopping you, Deke,” and she drives away, leaves him standing there in the middle of the street. When she reaches their building at the intersection with Twenty-third, Chance glances at the rearview mirror, and he’s gone.

S
carborough Pentecost and the pretty black-haired girl who usually calls herself Starling Jane climb the concrete stairway leading up and up to the long viaduct beside the old steel mill. As they go, the girl counts off the steps aloud—fifteen at the first landing, thirty-one at the second, and then she notices a nest with three robin chicks tucked into a cranny beneath the highway. She stops and leans out over the handrail to get a better view of the baby birds, and, “Will you please come on,” Scarborough says impatiently, wishing again that he could have left her in Atlanta, or Charleston, or anywhere, wishing that he’d never gotten stuck with her in the first place.

“But just look at them,” she says and cautiously reaches out towards the birds, three gray-brown, cream-speckled chicks huddled in a nest woven from twigs and dead grass, strips of plastic and paper and bits of a foam coffee cup. The cement behind them is spattered with chalky white smears of robin shit. All three birds remain absolutely motionless as her fingertips hover in the air just above their heads and the traffic roars past overhead, three sets of wide black eyes staring silently back at her.

“If you touch them, their mother will let them starve to death,” Scarborough warns her, and he glances at the angry momma robin perched on a nearby power line. She squawks twice and glares at them with all the fury a robin can muster.

“That’s not true,” Starling Jane says, skeptical, indignant, and her fingers drift an inch or so nearer the chicks. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh yes, she would,” Scarborough says, watching the distraught mother bird.

“No. Not just because I touched them.”

“If you touch them, then they’ll smell like you.”

“I don’t stink.”

“She thinks you do,” and Scarborough points at the bird on the wire. “If her chicks smell like you, she won’t believe they’re hers, and she won’t take care of them anymore.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’m afraid robins aren’t terribly bright creatures.”

Reluctantly, the girl pulls her hand back from the nest and frowns up at Scarborough, then at the momma robin. “Just because I
touched
them?” she asks. “That’s absolutely wicked. What kind of mother would do such a thing?”

“We don’t have all day,” Scarborough tells her, and Starling Jane sighs, shakes her head, and follows him up the stairway, goes back to counting steps, and there are forty-seven at the top.

“That’s not a bad number,” she says. “Four and seven are both lucky numbers for me, because I was born on the seventh day of the fourth month of—”

“Bullshit. You don’t
know
when you were born, Starling,” and Scarborough takes a very small pair of binoculars from the inside pocket of his black leather jacket. “Just like the rest of us.”

“They told me I could pick a birthday,” she says. “And I picked April seventh a long time ago.”

“Good for you. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Meaning is in the eye of the beholder.”

“That’s beauty, you silly twit.”

“Same thing,” Starling Jane sneers back at him, and then she watches the cars and trucks rushing past while Scarborough peers through his binoculars at the low, tree-covered mountain two or three miles south of the steel mill. To the west, Birmingham’s stingy, uneven skyline blocks out the horizon and the setting sun; to the north and east, a gray industrial wasteland threaded with back streets and railroads stretches away from the viaduct. There’s a chilly breeze, and she hugs herself, buttons her violet cardigan, and wishes she’d worn something warmer.

“The damned trees are in my way,” Scarborough grumbles and starts walking again, searching for a better view, leaving her behind. Starling Jane stands beside the guardrail and watches him go, willowy boy with his quick, determined stride, his narrow shoulders and straight brown hair tied up in a long ponytail. He stops and scowls back at her.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

“I was just looking around, that’s all,” she says and pretends that she was examining the old mill instead of watching him. She glances over the guardrail at the odd little park that’s been fashioned from the ruins of the mill, fifty feet down to a wide green lawn with its artful scatter of metal sculptures, rust-red skeletons like the shells of giant insects or the wrought-iron bones of dinosaurs. There’s an ancient steam shovel and a toothy ring of severed steam-shovel jaws laid out like megalithic stones near weathered heaps of slag. Farther on, a long casting shed where men once poured molten iron to cool in sandy channels, and past the shed, the towering smokestacks and blast stoves, rickety catwalks and a silver water tower with
SLOSS
printed across it in tall black letters. Starling Jane hugs herself tighter and hurries to catch up with Scarborough.

“Who was Sloss?” she asks, pointing at the water tower.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Sorry. I thought you knew
everything,
” and she smiles a sly, secretive smile and looks back down at the steam shovel.

“Maybe it was the name of the mill. I don’t know.”

“Maybe so,” she says. “Do you think she knows we’re here yet?”

“Maybe,” Scarborough says. “Probably,” and he peers through his binoculars again. There’s a gap between the casting shed and the furnaces, and from here he has an unobstructed view of the mountain. The tawny autumn-browned heads of trees, the roofs of buildings, a cast-iron giant standing on a stone pedestal at the mountain’s summit.

“That’s Vulcan,” he says. “The house is supposed to be somewhere just west of there.”

“Will she be waiting for us?”

“She’s always waiting for someone,” he replies.

Starling turns towards downtown, thinking how cities all start to look the same after just a while. The same harried loneliness behind tinted skyscraper windows and stone walls, and she wishes she were more like Scarborough and never got homesick.

“Vulcan was the god of the forge,” she says.

“That’s what the Romans said,” and now he’s examining a great gash through the mountainside that men have carved out for the highway, tries to imagine how the mountain must have looked before that wedge of rock was blasted loose and hauled away.

“The Greeks called him Hephaestus,” Starling Jane says. “He was born deformed, and his mother cast him down from Mount Olympus. Of all the gods, he was the only one who was ugly.”

“Is that a fact?” Scarborough asks her, returning his binoculars to his jacket pocket. He turns his back on the steel mill and the mountain and sits down on the guardrail.

“I don’t know if it’s a fact or not, but it’s the truth.”

“Poor fucker,” Scarborough laughs, and he jabs a thumb over his shoulder at the distant statue. “And the best gig he could get was guarding this dried-up old cunt of a city.” He takes a crumpled pack of Camels out of his jacket and offers one to Starling Jane.

“It doesn’t even have a river,” she says sadly, glances at the pack of cigarettes and shakes her head. “If I died here, how would my soul ever find its way down to the sea?”

“I’m sure they have sewers,” Scarborough mutters around the filter of his Camel. He tries to light it with a match, but the wind immediately blows the flame out.

“That’s not funny.”

“Yes it is,” and he strikes a second match, but the wind blows it out, as well. “You just don’t have a sense of humor.”

“I just don’t want to die here.”

“No one from Providence has a goddamn sense of humor.”

“There are bad places in the world to die. I think this is one of them,” she says quietly, and Scarborough curses when the wind snuffs out another match. Starling Jane takes the book away from him and strikes a fourth one, cups a hand around the flame long enough for him to light his cigarette, then she blows it out and drops the smoldering match over the edge of the viaduct. Scarborough takes a long drag and then breathes out a smoky gray ghost for the wind to shred between its invisible teeth.

“You’re not going to die here, bluebird,” he says, trying very hard to sound certain even if he isn’t, her apprehension starting to rub off on him, and Scarborough wonders how much trouble he’d be in if he put her on a train straight back to New England.

“I’m sure that’s exactly what the others thought, but that didn’t stop her from killing them.”

“Yeah, well just do me a favor and shut the fuck up about it for five minutes, okay?” and he doesn’t look at her because it’s easier if he doesn’t have to see her eyes; he smokes his Camel and watches the cars passing them by, all the careless, oblivious faces safe behind windshields and steering wheels, and no one looks back at him. After a minute or two, Starling Jane starts whistling an old gospel song she heard on the radio the day before. Scarborough takes a last, deep drag and flicks the butt to the asphalt at their feet, zips up his leather jacket and starts walking back towards the concrete stairway.

“What now?” she calls after him, and “It’s time to have a talk with Mr. Silvey,” he says and keeps on walking.

At first he doesn’t even know that he’s going to Sadie, just walking, motion for the dumb and simple sake of motion, a talisman against inertia, and Deacon leaves Morris Avenue behind him and crosses the arched beam bridge on Twenty-second Street. Leaving Chance behind, too, and maybe later he’ll try to explain it to her and she won’t listen because she’s never been able to talk about that part of him or even acknowledge that it might be real. The old bridge carries him high above the train tracks, orderly tangle of iron rails and wooden ties below, the Rainbow Bridge according to a bronze plaque at the top, and the many crumbling balusters have been wrapped round and round with silver-gray duct tape, the city’s half-assed idea of repair after chunks of falling concrete smashed through the windshields of cars in the streets and parking lots below. That was a couple of years ago, and now the duct tape has begun to fray and disintegrate, as well.

“Leave it to Birmingham to try and fix a bridge with duct tape,” Chance said the first time they saw what the Street and Sanitation people had done.

Deacon pauses at the crest of the bridge to watch a freight train passing underneath, rattling away towards the sunset. Rusted boxcars and tankers filled with chemicals, empty bulkhead flats and gondola cars, finally the red caboose bringing up the rear. By morning that train will be all the way to New Orleans or Memphis or Biloxi, he thinks, and some part of him wishes he were going with it. He waits until the train has grown small and far away, and then Deacon follows Twenty-second southeast, past used-car lots and gas stations, finally crosses Eighth Avenue into a tract of run-down Eisenhower-era housing projects.

“Yo, white boy,” a husky male voice shouts from a backyard and someone laughs. “You lost? You need directions?” and Deacon doesn’t reply, keeps walking, keeps his eyes on the sidewalk, counting cracks and dandelions, the distance from one streetlight pool to the next, until he’s safely out the other side again. The street curves gently and climbs a hill, and there’s the apartment building where Sadie Jasper lives, red and chocolate-brown bricks and screened-in front porches, low rent but not quite a slum, so she could be doing worse. Next door to the building is a seedy little nightclub, The Nick, like a house trailer built from cinder blocks; one of his old haunts, a mecca for cheap beer and deafeningly loud rock music, pool tables and smoky darkness.

Deacon glances back the way he’s come, towards the projects and downtown, towards home, the dusk deepening quickly to night, and then he looks back at the apartment building. There’s a light burning in one of Sadie’s windows, and he imagines her busy at the noisy old Royal typewriter she writes her stories on, the desk she built from a door and two sawhorses. By now, Chance is probably starting to wonder where he is, when he’s coming home, if maybe he’s found a liquor store.

He follows the short, crunchy path of crushed brick-and-limestone gravel from the sidewalk to the front door of the building, finds it unlocked and steps inside. The hallway smells like Indian food and stale cigarette smoke, the fainter stink of mold, and he walks down the short hall lit by bare, irregularly placed forty-watt bulbs. Sadie’s place is up on the second floor, and Deacon climbs the stairs two and three at a time before he can think better of it, before he talks himself out of seeing her.

Her place is right at the top of the stairs, and he knocks a little harder than necessary, afraid she won’t be there after all, that maybe she only left the light burning so it wouldn’t be dark when she comes home. No one answers, so he starts to knock again, and then “Hold your horses,” Sadie calls out from inside. “I’m coming.”

Deacon takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, wishing that his heart would quit racing. Not like he’s doing anything wrong, seeing an old friend he’s hardly spoken to in ages, not like he’s come here looking for booze or a fuck, just someone to talk to, someone who’ll listen to the things Chance won’t.

The door opens, and Sadie’s standing there in a long black T-shirt a size or two too large,
BAUHAUS
and a silk-screened shot of the sleepwalker from
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
fishnet tights and a pair of pink socks on her feet. At first she looks confused more than surprised to see him, Deacon Silvey the very last person she expected to see tonight, and then Sadie laughs and smiles. Her startling ice-blue eyes seem very bright in the dim light.