Red Moon (25 page)

Once again, no return address and a Seattle postmark. Once again, the name Hope Robinson encased by quotation marks. She hardly notices she is walking toward the exit until it opens in front of her and the wind comes through like a great gasp.

It is the boy from class, the one with the tidy part in his yellow hair and the neatly pressed Oxford pinstripe. She thinks his name is Francis. He is heading into the mailroom, but she is hurrying her way out, so he steps aside and holds the door open, an obligatory politeness. His chin is rashed over with acne. He doesn’t say anything and she barely whispers thank you as she moves past him.

The sun cooked away the fog by noon and now the sky is bright blue and the snow-dusted mountains are visible in the near distance. She starts toward her dorm but guesses Andrea is still lounging in the room, napping off her hangover or watching YouTube or instant-messaging about some crushable boy, some dreamed-of love, so she changes course to the library.

Aside from the union, it is her second-favorite building on campus, a blend of Old and New World architecture, a modern glass-walled addition built onto a columned building made from red sandstone. She keeps busy with her classes—mostly prereqs, Calculus, Comp, Poli-Sci, and Lycan History. Her free time she spends in the library. Avoiding Andrea, avoiding everyone. Conversation is impossible for her. During orientation, she learned, when she faced the weeklong barrage of bonding activities with her fellow freshmen, that after learning your name and major, everyone wants to know where you are from, who you are, who you will become. She has no way to respond. Her history has been erased; her future is uncertain. So she hides in the library, where silence is the norm.

She takes the elevator to the fourth floor and walks down the line of carrels until she reaches a shadowy corner. She pulls her laptop out of her backpack and while it hums and bleeps to life she runs a finger along the top of the envelope and shreds it open. Another DVD falls out. She fumbles it onto the tray.

On the screen she sees a grassy field with blacktop trail running through it. A park, she realizes. There is a bench along the trail. A picnic table along the tree line. The sky boils with clouds and the camera lens is spotted with rain. The grass and the dandelions gone to seed shudder against a mild wind.

A few minutes pass and then the woods spit out a runner. Miriam is wearing a black tank top and matching running shorts and she is sprinting, her arms chopping the air, her legs scissoring. For a moment, Claire worries that something will emerge from the woods behind her, chasing her. Then Miriam slows and brings her hands to her hips and breathes heavily and kicks her legs, kicking away the lactic acid. She walks in slow circles for a few minutes, then goes offscreen and the camera jogs left, following her to an empty playground structure. Beyond it Claire spots another asphalt trail snaking off and disappearing into a wall of willow trees. Miriam stretches her arms and then leaps up to grab hold of the monkey bars. She hammers out a set of ten pull-ups, her head rising neatly between the bars, her muscles surging and the wings tattooed on her back seeming to rise and fall and help lift her weight from the ground.

Then a hand suddenly appears, the hand of whoever holds the video camera. It rakes the air as though clawing at Miriam and then retreats from view. It is visible only for the flash of a few seconds. Claire can’t be certain she sees what she thinks she sees. So she leans forward and drags the recording back and hits pause and captures the hand midswipe. There it is, blurred but clear enough, a hand that from this angle appears as big as Miriam and ready to gobble her up. A three-fingered hand, curled like a talon.

Puck.

Every hour, from eight a.m. until ten p.m., a shuttle—colored gray and purple, the school’s colors—leaves the union and drives the ten minutes to Missoula. The university is isolated, and though it makes an effort, with its markets, coffee shops, bowling alley, bookstore, and bar—the shuttles are almost always full. There are three drop points: the mall, the Safeway, and downtown.

Claire heads downtown—not for the bars or the restaurants, like most of the other heavily perfumed and cologned students that pack the seats around her—but for Café Diablo, a red-walled coffee shop with ironwork chandeliers and black cracked-leather chains. She comes for the free Wi-Fi. All incoming and outgoing messages on campus are monitored, Miriam warned her, so she should never attempt to contact her except from a remote server. Claire created a special email address for this express purpose. Not gmail. Miriam didn’t trust the way they scanned their messages for direct advertising. They used Yahoo instead. [email protected] was her address. When Claire wrote it down on a piece of paper, Miriam rolled her eyes and asked if she might consider changing her username to drama.queen.

They have exchanged only a few messages since the school year began. They do not use names. They do not speak in specifics. “Things are good,” Claire wrote when she first arrived on campus, her hands hovering over the keyboard, so uncertain as to what she could and could not say. “I made it here fine and the location is prettier than I imagined.” Miriam demanded that Claire not make any reference to William Archer or her classes or anything that could pinpoint her identity, in case their accounts should be compromised. She was told, too, not to use her debit card when at the coffee shop—cash only—so that no one could coordinate her presence with this email filtering through that particular Internet port. Claire told her she was being paranoid. “Maybe,” Miriam said. “But people are looking for us. We’re invisible until we give them something to see.”

She was here yesterday. She has been here every day since receiving the first DVD. She hurries her green tea to a chair with a round-topped side table and splits open her laptop and taps her feet hurriedly against the floor and glances around at the few people reading newspapers and novels and chatting over a glass of wine or mug of cappuccino. She calls up her browser and logs in to Yahoo and discovers her inbox empty except for a message from Patrick. “Yesterday I saw a woman with hair the color of honey. She had her back turned to me. Thought it was you. Nearly called out your name. Were your ears warm? Thinking of you.”

What might have made her smile any other time makes her frown now. Nothing from Miriam. Four days and still no response to her four emails.

Claire punches out another message. “Another video arrived today. You in the park. On a run. It’s the little man. He’s alive. PLEASE RESPOND IMMEDIATELY to let me know you are okay!!!” She reads it over twice, making sure she hasn’t revealed anything critical, then hastily writes, “Love, C,” at the bottom. They have never used the word before, but it feels right.

She tries to make sense of what is happening. She doubts they are stalking her—what use is she to them? This is about psychological torture. Puck toying with her, maybe trying to draw her west, like the spider that plucks its web to make a song. She wonders if the same can be said of Miriam. Maybe Puck hasn’t captured her yet because he is afraid, because he is studying her habits, waiting for the right moment to strike—or maybe he is delaying his attack like a kind of foreplay to heighten his pleasure.

She remains in the coffee shop until right before the last shuttle arrives, trying to do her homework but spending most of her time hitting refresh, refresh, refresh on her browser, waiting for a response that never comes. Finally she punches out an email to Patrick. “Not doing well,” is all she says.

Two months ago, Miriam gave her a gift, a Glock, along with two bricks of ammo. “Keep it close,” she said. After Claire returns to her dorm, after she checks on Andrea—who lies in bed breathing heavily, her eyelids fluttering with sleep—she slides open her desk drawer and removes her pistol and climbs into bed with the safety on but her finger curved around the trigger.

T
HE OTHER NIGHT
Patrick dreamed about his father. He was standing outside the gates of the base. His cammies hung off him in tatters. Bruises coiled around his wrists and his ankles, and his bare feet were blue in the moonlight. A crow perched on his shoulder and when he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was the bird’s high, rusty cackle.

This was around the time when the cold snap hit, when the arctic wind came wailing through the valley, dropping the temperature forty degrees in a matter of hours. Several pipes froze and burst and shut down the latrine. A crew has been working on the problem ever since, with some luck, but in the meantime, everyone is using the Porta-Johns.

There aren’t enough of them. A dozen. A dozen shitters for the attachments and engineers and medical personnel and mechanics and cooks and five platoons of thirty Marines who at every meal stack their trays high with chow and who take great pride in the size and frequency of their waste.

Someone has to burn them once a day, and that someone is Patrick, along with the rest of his squad. All the platoons work in two-week rotations on whatever tasks keep the base running. The personal security detail (PSD) escorts the company commander and any other visiting brass to the towns and the Tuonela Mine. The quick reactionary force (QRF) is always locked and loaded, ready to react, to depart the base with a minute’s notice in case of an attack on a patrol or forward operating base (FOB) or uranium mine or battle position. The presence patrol drives around in four-hour shifts for movement-to-contacts, trying to draw out the baddies, or for knock-and-talks with locals, trying to make peace with the locals and hand out candy to the kids, most of whom are happy to see the soldiers, happy for the security, happy for their jobs at the mine.

Then there is security and bitchwork. Always assigned to the nonranks. Manning the posts. Washing dishes, folding laundry, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, polishing, stacking ammo, hauling and knifing open the endless parade of conex boxes full of toilet paper, bags of rice, cans of beans. And burning the shitters.

His entire platoon remains on security and bitchwork for the next rotation, but every platoon is made up of three squads of twelve soldiers, and their sergeant makes certain it is Patrick’s squad who get the shitters. Thanks to Trevor.

They strap four shitters into the bed of the MTVR, along with a stack of tongs and muck-encrusted rebar, a pile of welder’s gloves, several gallons of diesel. Then they drive five miles downwind from the base to a basin blackened and reeking from years of burned garbage and excrement. They unload the shitters and unhinge their back doors and tong out their depositories and splash them full of diesel and spark a match and step back as the flames and black smoke coil out of the half-frozen mess within the barrels. After a minute they step forward, into the stink, into the heat, to stir the barrels with the rebar. Day after day of this, and with the showers down, no amount of scrubbing at the sinks can get the smell from their skin.

Patrick stands there, leaning on the rebar as if it were a cane, his eyes watering, his mouth razed with the taste of charred shit, while next to him, Trevor, oblivious to their situation, blathers on and on about how he and his pals used to go noodling for catfish in the bayou. Over his helmet he wears the pelt of the wolf he shot, its head draped over his, its body and tail dangling down his back like a second skin. The smoke swirls and the shit hisses and bubbles and pops and the snow around them melts away to reveal a ten-foot circle of browned grass.

This is not how Patrick imagined his time in the Republic.

He imagined himself in a Humvee, in the machine-gun turret, rolling through trash-strewn streets and lighting up anything that moved. He imagined himself at a battle outpost, hurling a grenade and ducking down to jam his hands against his ears. He imagined himself cracking the butt of his rifle against the face of a bearded man and flex-cuffing his hands behind his back and dragging him to base to reveal, in a shrieking confession, the whereabouts of his father. And he imagined, finally, kicking down the door to a compound and surprising people in bed or watching television who would lift their arms in surprise when he made their bodies dance with bullets, and in a back room he would find his father, blindfolded, his wrists and ankles duct-taped, starved and beaten, but alive. He imagined it would be more like a video game, more like the movies. And he imagined, too, that he might find a saner, more stable version of the community he felt with the Americans.

Instead he found himself in a country of frightened people who only wanted to be left alone, their way of life threatened by the extremist rebels who called them cowards and the U.S. military rapists, raiders.

Patrick’s first night at the base, his staff sergeant joked that he couldn’t be killed and put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, the chamber empty, the bunkhouse full of ugly laughter. This was Dave Decker, the E-6 in charge of his platoon. His head was shaped like an egg on its side and he wore thick, square glasses that made his eyes swim. He was muscular but had large buttocks that seemed all the more prominent due to the way he stood, bent forward at the waist. He walked around with his mouth open, like a shark. He holstered his pistol and clapped Patrick painfully on the back and said he was just joking of course but that the boy ought not to expect any special treatment.

The first few weeks, Patrick tried to ask about his father, but the base had gone through a major rotation that summer, the twelve-month deployments turning over. Few knew Keith Gamble besides the brass, who considered the Guard units the shit-
sucking
bottom-feeders of the military and couldn’t understand why a pretty-boy media-fucking darling like Patrick was here at all and what he wanted to prove and how he had a target on his back and why in the hell he, a green bitch pussy motherfucker fresh off the plane, thought it was okay to talk to an officer like an officer was a friend. Every now and then somebody would talk to him, but what they said didn’t tell him anything: “He was a good man,” and “Sorry for your loss,” and “He made a hell of a beer, I’ll give you that.”

Patrick soon learned the mandatory distance between the ranks and nonranks. They were different animals. The CO and gunnery and lieutenants and captains did not go out on the wire. They did not often leave their quarters. They dealt with intelligence and set up missions that the grunts on the ground then carried out. “Do you understand what you are now?” Decker told the platoon one day during a drill. “You are part of the death machine.”

The death machine. He isn’t sure what Decker meant by that. The Marines or the military. The base or the Republic. Or maybe life. Maybe life was the death machine, a big nightmare with jacked-up wheels and chainsaw mandibles that never stopped mowing down bodies, never stopped eating.

That certainly seems possible now, as he stands in this basin, its sloping walls and charred debris and smoky exhalation making him feel like he has never been closer to the underworld, the trapdoor to Hades beneath his feet. He curses himself and his situation, disgusted by his powerlessness, and gives his barrel another stir, too rough this time, knocking it over, the burning sludge oozing across the ground. He curses again and hurls his rebar like a spear. It lands a few feet away and coughs up a divot of black earth and emits a strange crunch.

He looks over to see if anyone noticed his little tantrum. But Trevor has the ear of another private, the two of them stirring their barrels like cauldrons while debating who would be a better lay, Angelina Jolie or Cameron Diaz.

Patrick approaches the rebar and pulls it from the ground and in doing so uncovers a jumble of bones. He crouches down and sweeps away with his gloves what could be the skull of a dog or a wolf. He withdraws it and it sheds big chunks of earth and he blows the black dust from the eye sockets and then notices all around him, poking out of the dirt and patches of snow like some dead garden, bones, dozens of them.