Low Red Moon (6 page)

But she met him anyway, the summer night that she and Elise Alden got drunk on Jack Daniel’s and walked from Chance’s house to the homely little park at the end of Nineteenth Street, a few months before Elise moved away to Atlanta. Not really much of a park at all, though it had a few dogwood trees, a weathered, graffiti-scarred gazebo with a picnic table, and the gated entrance to the city’s old water works tunnel. A place that Chance had always avoided because it had a reputation as a hangout for junkies, a reputation that had earned it the nickname Needle Park.

Following the “nature trail” down from Sixteenth Avenue into the park, limestone gravel scattered between railroad ties, a crude footpath for curious urban hikers who’d never seen kudzu and poison ivy and blackberry briers up close. Halfway down and Chance and Elise heard voices, angry voices, someone shouting, and “Come on,” Chance said, leaning against a tree so she wouldn’t fall down. “Let’s go back home.”

“Wait a minute. I want to see what’s happening,” and Elise took another step along the trail, then stopped and peered through darkness and a thicket of briers at the dimly lit park below.

“What’s happening is none of our goddamn business,” Chance said, wishing she wasn’t starting to feel nauseous, that the world would stop spinning just long enough for her to drag Elise’s dumb ass back home where it was safe and she could at least be sick in a toilet instead of in the bushes.

“Oh, Christ. It’s a couple of big guys beating up a hippie.”

“Too bad,” Chance said. She took a deep breath and looked up at the sky, the branches overhead, Heaven far too stained by streetlights for her to ever see the stars. A cacophony of hateful male voices and the cicadas screaming in the trees, and she tried to remember why coming down here had ever seemed like a good idea.

“I think they might be skinheads,” Elise whispered excitedly.

“They’re not skinheads.”

“Well, one of them has a big swastika on his T-shirt.”

“Good. I’m going home now.”

“Oh god, Chance. He has a
knife
.”

“
Now,
Elise.”

“Hey, fuckface!” Elise shouted at the guy with the knife. “Yeah, you. Leave him alone, or I’m gonna call the cops!”

The guy growled back something that Chance couldn’t quite make out, but she understood his meaning well enough, no need to speak pit bull when one of them starts barking at you. She grabbed for the collar of Elise’s shirt and missed, just a humid handful of night air for her trouble, and Elise was already scrambling towards the little gazebo at the end of the steep trail.

“That asshole’s gonna cut your throat!” Chance screamed and stumbled after her.

But there was someone else, waiting in the gazebo, someone they hadn’t noticed before, gaunt man hidden in the shadows, and Chance almost screamed when she saw him. He was sitting alone at the picnic table, a pint liquor bottle in front of him. When he saw Elise and Chance, he held one hand out like a traffic cop.

“Is that your little girlfriend, faggot?” the guy with the knife asked the hippie. “Is that your girlfriend coming to save your sorry faggot ass?”

“Don’t move, either one of you,” the man beneath the gazebo whispered. “Don’t make a single goddamn sound,” and he stood up, then, and Chance could see how tall he was. She saw something clutched tight in his right hand, too, but she didn’t realize what it was until he stepped out of the shadows. A piece of board that might have been part of the picnic table once, and the guy with the knife turned towards him while the other guy, the one with the swastika on his T-shirt, kicked the hippie in the stomach. The tall man from the gazebo held the piece of board concealed behind his back as he walked quickly towards the skinhead with the knife.

“Hell no, it ain’t your little girlfriend. It’s your goddamn faggot
boy
friend.”

“Maybe he wants a taste of this shit, too,” the guy in the Nazi shirt said and kicked the hippie again. “Maybe he wants to suck our dicks.”

“Is that it?” the skinhead with the knife asked. “You want to suck on my fuckstick, faggot?”

The board came out from behind the tall man’s back and smashed the skinhead in the face, a black spray of blood from his nose and mouth, his shattered front teeth like broken ivory pegs, and the knife slipped from his hand to the grass. The tall man kicked the knife away and swung the board again, catching the second guy hard across the back of his shaved head. A loud crack, the sound of someone hitting a baseball, hitting a home run, and the skinhead dropped to his knees without a word, then fell over face forward on top of the hippie.

“Fuck,” Elise whispered, her voice equal parts shock and admiration, and Chance, who’d finally had enough, sat down at the picnic table and puked on the ground between her shoes. And maybe she passed out for a while, because just a moment later the tall man was bending over her, wiping her face with a handkerchief, and both the skinheads and the hippie were gone. She could hear police sirens in the distance, getting closer. Chance’s stomach rolled again, cramped, and she doubled over.

“Take deep breaths,” he said. “Slow and easy. It’ll pass.”

“Dude, that was
so
fucking cool,” Elise bubbled drunkenly. “I mean,
shit,
you must know kung fu or karate or something, right? You must have been in the Marines or something.”

“No,” he said. “I’m just a drunk with a stick.”

“My name is Chance,” Chance said and swallowed, trying to keep from throwing up again. Her mouth tasted like bourbon and bile, and her throat burned.

“Good to meet you, Chance. I’m Deacon,” the tall man said. “But I think we’d better get moving now. It’ll probably be best if we aren’t still here when the cops show up.”

“Yeah,” Chance said and heaved again.

“Better give me a hand,” Deacon said to Elise, and together they carried Chance back up the trail to the street.

Downstairs, Chance and Alice follow the collections manager past the Patagonian dinosaurs, between the legs of the
Argentinosaurus,
and Chance cranes her neck and stares up at the rib-hollow belly of the beast, suspended fifteen feet or more above her head.

“I only study things I can hold in my palm,” Alice says and waves a hand dismissively at the giants. “That’s my motto.”

“What is your specialty, Dr. Sprinkle?” Irene asks.

“Depends. Sometimes, it’s Ordovician brachiopods. Other times, it’s Oligocene bryozoans. I don’t like to be pigeonholed.”

And then Chance’s cell phone starts ringing, and “That’s mine,” she says quickly, fishing it out of a pocket of her overalls.

“Is that safe?” Irene says. “For the baby, I mean?”

Chance shrugs. The number displayed on the phone’s tiny, oil-gray LCD screen is nothing familiar, but there’s a 205 area code, so she knows it’s Alabama. She presses
TALK
and holds up one finger to show that she’ll only be a moment.

“Chance?” Deacon says, his voice faint and far away, stretched thin and flat by distance and digital electronics. “Are you okay? Are you at the museum?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just fine. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’ll tell you about it when you get home. It’s been a weird day, that’s all,” but Deacon’s voice has that brittle edge it gets whenever he’s anxious or afraid, the way he sounded the first couple of weeks he was sober. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“The downtown library. I thought I’d do some reading.”

Chance glances at Alice and the collections manager. Alice is staring thoughtfully up at the underside of the sauropod skeleton, and Irene Mesmer seems to be staring at its shadow on the stone floor.

“But you’re
okay,
right?” Chance asks him, turning the tables, and Deacon doesn’t answer.

“Deke?”

“Yeah, baby, I’m just fine. It’s not that. I promise. You know I’d tell you if it was that.”

“Honey, I gotta go. We’re about to have a look at the exhibit.”

“So, all the fossils got there in one piece?”

“As far as I know. Nothing’s been unpacked yet.”

“Well,” he says, and she can tell he doesn’t want to hang up, trying to squeeze a few more seconds out of the conversation. “I guess I should let you go. You’re busy.”

“You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s jake.”

“I wish you were here. I’ll have to bring you to see these dinosaurs. They’re incredible,” and she looks up at the pelvis of the
Argentinosaurus,
big as a Volkswagen.

“I’m just gonna hang around the library for a while,” Deacon says. “I’ll head home before dark.”

“You should take the DART. It’s only fifty cents.”

“I’d rather walk.”

Alice is glaring at her impatiently now. “I really gotta go, okay,” Chance says. And yeah, he says, yeah, I know, but the reluctance easy enough to hear.

“I love you, Chance,” he says, and she still hasn’t gotten used to hearing that.

“You too, Deke. You stay busy, okay?”

He hangs up first, and Chance apologizes, returns the phone to her overalls pocket.

“Is anything wrong?” Alice asks, but she sounds a lot more irritated than concerned.

“No, Deke just wanted to be sure I was okay, you know.”

“Shall we?” Irene asks and motions towards the banner hung above a nearby doorway—
AT THE OCEAN’S EDGE: FISH WITH FEET
. Tall letters, swirling shades of blue and white and deep green on a canvas banner.

“That’s not the title we agreed on,” Chance says.

“Oh, yeah. We decided that ‘ocean’ would sound better. It has a sort of romance that ‘river’ doesn’t.”

“But it’s not
right.
The earliest amphibians were almost certainly not marine. And all my Pottsville and Parkwood specimens are freshwater.”

Irene smiles a strained, slightly embarrassed smile. “Yes, but ‘At the River’s Edge’ just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

“Yes, but this is
wrong.
”

“Let’s see what’s inside, Chance,” Alice says. “We can work this out later.”

“I’m very sorry,” the collections manager says. “I didn’t think it would matter that much.”

“Well, it does. In fact, it matters a great deal,” Chance grumbles, and then she walks quickly beneath the mistaken, ocean-colored banner before Alice can tell her to shut up.

Her first date with Deacon a few weeks after the night in the park. Dinner at Pizza Hut, and then she drove them to Irondale for a movie, Terry Gilliam’s
12 Monkeys,
and Deacon snuck two cans of Budweiser into the theater. He pronounced the movie ridiculous, a hodgepodge of silly time-travel clichés dragged out to save the world, and afterwards they sat in the parking lot outside the multiplex and watched teenagers and talked. Deacon had four more cans of Bud stashed beneath the front seat of the Impala, warm, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“You drink a lot,” she said, and he nodded and opened another can of beer.

“Yes, I do. It’s sort of my chosen vocation.”

A Lincoln Continental, blaring rap music and loaded down with black kids, rolled slowly past,
thump thump thump,
and there was no use trying to talk until they’d gone.

“You don’t listen to that hip-hop Snoop Dogg shit, do you?” Deacon asked, and Chance shook her head. “Well, that’s good, ’cause I don’t date girls that listen to that junk.”

“I don’t listen to any music very much. Not since I was a kid.”

“Is that so? Damn,” and he took a long drink from the can of Bud and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“So what
do
you like?”

“You mean besides beer?”

“What kind of
music
do you like?”

Deacon belched, excused himself, and stared out the windshield at the black sky above the strip mall. “Lots of shit, just not rap. Jazz, blues, Muddy Waters, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. Joy Division. Nick Cave. The Clash.”

“I like Billie Holiday,” Chance said.

“Well, anyone who digs Lady Day can’t be all bad.”

“I was really into the Smashing Pumpkins for a while,” she said. “Back in high school, I thought Billy Corgan hung the moon.”

“But you’re all better now, right?” Then Deacon finished the Bud, crumpled the can, and tossed it out the window. It clattered loudly on the asphalt.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh hell, half of what I say don’t mean shit, Chance. Half of it you can just ignore.”

“How am I supposed to know which half I’m
not
supposed to ignore?”

Deacon turned around in his seat and stared at her instead of staring at the August sky, fixed her with his sleepy eyes the color of magnolia leaves and broken Coca-Cola bottles. “You’re smart,” he said. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”