Red Moon (4 page)

C
HASE CAN’T GET
used to it. Eight months into his first term and every time somebody nods at him and addresses him as Governor Williams, he feels like he ought to turn around, see if some blue-blood Yale grad is standing behind him. He likes to think of himself as country. He knows this is what got him elected. “He’s real people,” his supporters like to say.

He still wears Justin cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans, but usually with a Calvin Klein sport coat. He still speaks with a twang, but especially when he takes to the microphone at a press conference or town hall forum. But it has been a long time since he mucked out a horse stall, hefted irrigation pipe, mended a fence, fired a shot at anything except a paper target. And Salem is a long way from the ranch in Eastern Oregon, where he grew up, the three thousand acres of alfalfa, the six thousand head of cattle.

A long way indeed. Right now he sits cross-legged on the floor, holding a pair of chopsticks and clacking them together, hungrily, over a Japanese woman lying on a straw mat, her naked body decorated with a colorful array of sushi placed on tea leaves. He dines directly off her. She does not move—she barely breathes—even when he traces his chopsticks along her collarbone, to the base of her neck, where in the hollowed-out dip there rests a
gunkanzushi
—sea urchin wrapped in seaweed—that he plucks away and devours.

This is the Kazumi Teahouse, where Chase often comes for lunch, dinner, only a twenty-minute drive from the capitol building, in southeast Salem, off Lancaster Drive. Paper lanterns and tea lights softly illuminate the main dining room. Scrolls bearing Japanese characters hang from the walls, evenly spaced and separated by potted bamboo. A rectangular koi pond runs down the center of the restaurant, bright with water lilies, and to either side of the pond sit men who dine off female bodies, slowly unveiling their nakedness.

“Governor Williams?” The voice comes from behind him.

“What?” Chase turns to see the waiter—a woman in a black kimono with pink roses stitched along its edges—bowing toward him, carrying a tray on which rests the sake bomb he ordered, a ceramic bowl of Koro set next to a pint of Rogue Amber. The waiter pours the sake into the beer and hands it to Chase, who toasts the glass and takes a heavy gulp and smacks his lips and says, “Oh, is that good. That is so, so good. Thank you.”

Nearby, on a spotlighted circular stage, a gray-haired Japanese woman in a dark blue kimono kneels before a koto shaped like a crouching dragon. When strummed, the thirteen woven strings stretched over ivory bridges make the air vibrate.

She watches Chase, and eventually a stare seals between them. Her eyes are black slits that swallow light and give nothing back. Maybe he sees in her face some silent disapproval, some forbidding reminder of one of his ex-wives or Augustus, his chief of staff, who tells him not to come here.

The reporters like to splash his face across the newspapers walking out of strip clubs, heckling the ref and hurling popcorn at Trail Blazers games, speedboating along the Columbia with two women half his age wearing American flag bikinis. He doesn’t care.

But Augustus does. Augustus, with his buffalo head and highfalutin vocabulary, keeps imploring him—that’s the word he used,
imploring
, as in
I implore you
—to think about the next election, about the ammunition he is giving his opponents. But the next election seems a long way off. And besides, he ran as an independent, and independent is who he is, and who he is got him elected, thank you very much. “I’d rather be an open door,” he told Augustus. “I don’t hide my dirty business like all the rest of these crooks. And people appreciate that. Because my dirty isn’t that dirty. What you see is what you get. Nobody’s going to catch me taking bribes or cheating on my wife.”

“You aren’t married.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Just like I was saying, independent.”

He discovered Japanese food only a few years ago, and the chopsticks are still difficult for him to handle, but with some concentration he is able to grip them steadily, to bring the
temaki
and the
gunkan
and the
norimaki
to his mouth, relishing not just the strange spongy textures and sharp spices, but the beautiful woman beneath him—her skin so pure and hairless, so different from the hands that hover over her, tanned and calloused, dark hair curling up his knuckles.

“You are a sight,” he says and mashes a roll with his teeth.

The old woman plucks the koto, and the restaurant seems to move according to the music’s slow, steady rhythm—chopsticks and teacups rising and falling—as if strings connect them all, long dangling red strings the old woman tugs.

In his pocket, his BlackBerry vibrates. He considers letting the call go. That’s the worst thing about the job, the constant questions, the pestering, everyone wanting his attention, demanding something of him, a vote, a law, a promise, a repeal, a speech. But when he pulls out the phone, the caller ID reads Augustus Remington and he knows if he doesn’t answer, Augustus will simply call him back, over and over, until he answers.

He brings the phone to his ear and says, “Buffalo! Guess where I’m—”

“Be quiet. Just be quiet for a moment, please. Something has happened.”

S
LEEP USED TO
come like a guillotine. Patrick would crawl into bed and pull the sheets up to his neck and in less than a minute the darkness would come crashing down. It always seemed like that, like it was coming from above, suddenly descending on him.

Now when he lies awake, when the shadows creeping across the ceiling begin to coalesce and fall toward him, he will startle, snap open his eyes, shake his head. It’s not that he doesn’t want to sleep—he is constantly exhausted and wants more than anything to feel rested again—it’s the dreams he can do without.

He is on the plane. Outside his window, clouds pearl and glimmer with lightning. He feels a hand on his wrist. He turns to the woman next to him and her mouth opens as if to tell him something. Instead a tongue falls out, a too-long tongue that rolls with her panting. Her breath smells like carrion. Her gums bleed as her teeth grow into points. Her eyes turn yellow as if lit by some sulfurous light. He looks past her, looks for help, only to discover that everyone on board is staring at him. Even the flight attendants, the pilots in the open door of the cockpit. They all begin to wail and rip off their clothes and move toward him with their claws greedily outstretched.

If not for these dreams, he wouldn’t want to wake up. He wouldn’t want to throw off the covers and stumble down the hall and crunch through a bowl of cereal and scrub his armpits under the hot spray of the shower and pull on the new jeans and polo his mom bought him at the mall especially for this day, his first day at Old Mountain High.

She is already gone, his mother, off to show a house. But on the counter, beneath his keys, she has left him a note.
Good luck,
it reads.
I love you!
Her handwriting reminds him of barbed wire. He crumples up the paper and tosses it in the garbage can on his way out the door.

His black Wrangler sits in the driveway. It is his first car, a gift bought thirdhand by his mother to help with the transition. “I know this isn’t easy,” she said when she dropped the keys in his palm. “And I want you to be happy. I hope this helps a little.” She tries. She really does. Saying “I love you,” every chance she gets. Asking if he wants to talk, if not to her, then somebody else?—she knows a therapist who could help. “No, thanks,” he tells her. “I’m not into that,” and when she asks what he means by
that
, he says, “Talking.”

The passenger-side headlight is cracked and gives off a weak, sputtery glow. Duct tape holds together sections of the soft top, which at high speeds flaps and whistles like a panicked gathering of birds. Wherever he parks he leaves behind puddles of oil and antifreeze dusted over with rust. Regardless of its disrepair, he kind of loves the Jeep.

Bits of quartz catch the sun and flash from the gravel driveway when he drives down it and turns onto the blacktop that will carry him the five miles to school. Here, along the shoulder, is where the news vans parked a month ago, the reporters huddled next to the mailbox, the cameras trained at the house like howitzers. They were waiting for him to come out, and when he didn’t, they eventually left. He did only one interview—and that was enough. He didn’t have anything to say. Everyone had died except for him. Not because he did anything special. But because he hid beneath a body and played dead. That wasn’t something to retell, relive—that was something to forget.

The worst moment, the moment when he felt a gust of debilitating fear blow through him, was after they landed, after the plane skidded and braked along the runway and the river of blood came rushing down the aisle. They taxied a short distance and Patrick was certain that in these final moments the lycan would discover him, certain the police or military would grenade the plane, certain he wouldn’t make it—he couldn’t possibly make it. There had been too much death, too much to escape. In a way, he already felt like a corpse himself, unmoving, barely breathing, soaked in gore.

He couldn’t see them, but he could sense them, the huddle of squad cars, fire trucks, ambulances, all with their lights flashing. Then, over the loudspeakers, came the pilot’s voice: “You’re going down, you fucking dog.” In response the lycan made a sound like sheets of metal being torn in half.

With the woman’s body draped over him, her arms wrapped around him in a limp hug and her chin resting sharply against the top of his head, Patrick could see nothing except her blood-splattered blouse and the patterned cloth of his seat cushion. He didn’t dare to reposition her, not even an inch, afraid of the noise he might make.

He could hear the thing moving up and down the aisle, its feet—or paws—or whatever they were—thudding into bodies and squelching through blood, so much blood, soaked into the thin carpeting, the foam cushions, his clothes, everything around Patrick tacky and sloshing with it. When the plane at last came to a rocking halt, he could hear its claws against the plastic, fumbling with the emergency door a few rows ahead of him. There was a sudden wind, a burst of sunlight, when the lycan tore it away.

Immediately the bullets came ripping through the opening—and into its body. Patrick could hear this too. The metal impacting meat. The yowling that gurgled over with blood. The thudding collapse of its body. The gunfire continued for another few seconds. Patrick startled enough at the noise to shove away the body, slide its flopping weight away from his face. Its head thudded against his thigh while one of its hands maintained a stubborn grip on his shoulder. From where he huddled he could see white sparks, an arc of orange flame, as the bullets tore through the plane’s interior, ringing off metal armrests, puncturing foam and plastic, clipping wires. The smell of smoke charred over the smell of blood.

There followed a silence long enough that he fell momentarily out of time and forgot that they had landed, that the lycan had been shot, that he was going to be all right. Then came a voice, a man’s voice hopped up with fear and anger. “Is there anybody alive in here?” it said. “Is there anybody in there?”

Patrick wanted to say yes. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move either. Couldn’t kick away the body now draped across his lap, his hand tangled up in her hair. Couldn’t even lift an arm to signal his survival. It wasn’t until later—long after the men dressed in black Kevlar and toting assault rifles crashed down the aisle and yelled, “Clear!” after the pilots escaped through the cockpit emergency hatch—that the agents climbed on board.

They were dressed in plastic goggles, elastic breathing masks, milky plastic suits, latex gloves, booties. Two of them carried clipboards and one of them a long-nosed camera. After the cameraman had taken several photos of the lycan sprawled on the floor, the carcass was zippered into a bag and dragged away. The cameraman then climbed through the puzzle of bodies, making his way to the first-class cabin, where so many had gathered and tried to escape and met their end. He was in there for some time, the bursts of his flash shimmering through the plane’s interior, before he entered the main cabin again and walked row to row and snapped several photos, first of the seat number, then of the passengers in their final repose.

When he appeared at row 15, he looked at Patrick without really seeing him. It wasn’t until the flash went off that Patrick flinched and the man reared back. “Holy shit,” he said even as he snapped another photo, the flash blazing, melting through Patrick’s eyes and his memory of the next few minutes, as he was dragged from his hiding place. “Are you hurt?” the voices said. “What happened?” “What’s your name?” “Why are you alive?”

“No,” he kept saying. “No,” over and over again as if it were the only word he knew.

With his joints sour and aching, with his vision a white haze as if veiled by a cataract, he can only now remember feeling he had grown suddenly older, nearly dead and dragged from the grave.

Old Mountain High School is built into the side of a hill. Its walls are made of roughly hewn basalt bricks, and its roof, a red sloping steel. The parking lot is the size of a football field, and every spot seems filled as Patrick drives up and down its many rows, searching, his foot teasing the brake, depressing it frequently to make way for the students streaming toward the school, laughing and calling to each other, punching messages into their cell phones, turtling under the weight of their backpacks. The air is busy with their voices and with the country music that blasts from the rolled-down windows of jacked-up pickup trucks. The sun flashes across the hood of the Jeep, and when he blinks it away two too-tan girls—in short shorts and V-neck tops, their blond hair flattened and lustrous as though plaited from gold—appear in front of him. He stomps the brake and the Jeep shudders and creaks to a halt. The girls pause in their conversation to look at the car, and then at him, with distaste.

At the far end of the lot he finds a spot and hauls from the backseat his pack and slams shut the door. As he walks, the Jeep seems to walk with him and he realizes in a panic that it has begun to roll. He curses and tries to wrestle it to a stop with his hands and then jumps into the cab to engage the emergency brake, the only way to keep the vehicle in place.

He looks over his shoulder twice when crossing the lot, in part to make sure the Jeep hasn’t rolled away or lost a tire or burst into flames, but his gaze is full of longing too as he considers climbing behind the wheel, revving the engine, driving over the mountains, then south along the coast without glancing a single time into the rearview.

Two thousand students and he knows not a single one. He brings his fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinches. Ever since he moved here he has had a vague headachy pain behind his eyes. His mother blames it on tension and altitude. He blames his bed. His mother bought it from a neighbor, a woman whose son had a job and a fiancée in Portland, so she was changing his bedroom into the guest room and upgrading from the twin to a queen-size. Every time Patrick rolls into bed, he finds it unsettling, with the impression of someone else still in the mattress, a dent where another body had been, just one more reminder that this place is not his own.

He doesn’t mind the landscape. The deep-rutted glaciers glowing from the Cascades. The thickly forested foothills with their hiking trails and bear-grass meadows and white-water rivers. And then, to the east, the sprawl of the sage flats interrupted by the occasional striped canyon, the bulge of a cinder cone. Hanging above all of this a sky, that high-altitude sky, as glassy and blue as the stripe inside a marble.

But his mother is a stranger and his bed reminds him of a coffin and he wakes up in the night to pee and crashes into the wall or the bookcase because the room isn’t his own. Twelve months, he thinks to himself, pushing through the glass-doored entrance, shouldering through the crowds of students. Twelve months and his father will be home, which means he will be home, and it will be as though he never climbed aboard Flight 373.

The morning passes in a blur. He forgets his locker combo. He tries to navigate the many crowded hallways and won’t ask for directions and ends up slipping late into each of his classes and facing the students’ hooded eyes. Teachers wearing glasses and ill-fitting slacks lick their fingers when walking up and down the desk rows, laying down syllabi, reading aloud course expectations in voices that seem already half-stunned with boredom.

He has a difficult time paying attention. He feels hopped-up, jittery. He can’t seem to get enough oxygen. The lights are too bright. The chairs are too cold and rigid. He chews a hole in his cheek and drinks his blood. The clock clicks its way toward noon, and its sound reminds him of a detonator.

He remembers, in grade school, the Magic Eye books that were so popular at the time. You would stare at a patterned page until your eyes went out of focus—and then an image would rise from the page and startle you. He remembers one page in particular, a page carrying the shape of the moon—and out of its cratered grayness rose a skull. He had slammed shut the book and for some time avoided looking at the moon too closely, always closing his blinds at night for fear that it would roll past his window and grin down on him.

In this manner his day progresses, the ordinary sharpening into the dangerous. A slammed locker is a bomb. A snapped pencil is a broken bone. A girl with her hair dyed black and her face powdered white is a corpse.

He jerks his head, hearing his name muttered everywhere, but never directly to him. “Patrick,” they say under their breath. “Patrick.” At the drinking fountain, after a splash of water, he turns to find a girl with long bangs staring at him through her hair. When he says, “What?” she half gasps, half giggles, before jogging away.

He wonders if he is hearing things, imagining things, or if anyone actually recognizes him. He hopes they don’t. His photograph, he knows, was splashed across newspapers, magazines, television reports, including the
Oregonian
and the
Old Mountain Tribune
. “Miracle Boy,” they called him. But a month has passed. And he has always thought of himself as rather nondescript—brown hair, medium height, ropily muscled, ball cap pulled low, his only distinguishing feature the red birthmark shaped like a half-moon next to his right eye.

But their eyes are on him—he is certain of it now—every face in the hallway turning to regard him, every teacher lingering on his name at roll, blinking hard when he raises his hand. He tries to shrug off the attention. Most of these students, after all, have taken classes, played sports together since they were in grade school. People notice the new guy. That’s all he is to them: the new guy. They’re sizing him up, trying to figure out who he is, where he’ll fit.

But a group of skinheads—he thinks that’s what they are, their eyes hard and their hair razored down to a bristling shadow—has him worried. He has spotted a dozen of them. Or maybe the same three or five people keep wandering past him, staring. They wear white shirts tucked into khakis, combat boots. He spots on the backs of their hands a tattoo he can’t quite make sense of, some symbol that looks like a bullet.