Red Moon (7 page)

S
OMETIMES PATRICK PLAYS
this game when he is bored. He will doodle a shape. Say, a hand. And then he will transform it, see what else might come out of it, whether a turkey or the starburst of a gunshot window. Now, in third-period English, in the margins of his notebook, he draws a circle. The circle becomes the moon—pocked with shadowy craters. The moon becomes a face with wild eyes, a nose and mouth. Then he fills the mouth with fangs and draws black squiggles through the eyes.

An aisle runs down the middle of the room with three tables to either side of it. He hides in the back right corner. Next to him sits a girl—he noticed her earlier when she sat down, smelling of raspberries—and he realizes that she is now leaning toward him, peering at his notebook. He slides his hand over the drawing, which makes it especially obvious how empty the page is, void of any notes except for the title of the play,
Othello
, also scrawled on the chalkboard in looping script.

The teacher, Mrs. O’Neil, has squinty eyes, an embarrassed smile, and a gray helmet of hair. With her hands clasped, she paces back and forth before the chalkboard, and whatever she says—something about betrayal and “the Other”—everyone scribbles into their notebooks. She makes her fingers into quotation marks whenever she says “the Other.”

He tries to pay attention, but then he glances at the girl and loses the lecture once more. Her hair is cut short, ending at her ears in curling points that frame her face like a pair of red wings. She doesn’t move her head, but her eyes dart sideways and catch him. She gives him a small smile that doesn’t go away, even as her attention returns to the front of the room.

Mrs. O’Neil is droning on about the film they’ll watch next week, the one directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, who plays the moor as a lycan. “Won’t that be interesting?” she says. Someone’s phone goes off—and just as suddenly goes silent. Mrs. O’Neil smiles in a way that makes many more wrinkles appear like fissures on her face. Everyone, she says, please turn to act two, scene one.

It is then, when the room fills with the flutter and slash of turned pages, that the girl draws her chair toward Patrick with a screech. He smells again her raspberry shampoo—the smell of red, the color of her hair—and breathes deeply of it, his breath catching when her hand finds his thigh beneath the table.

The weight of it is tremendous. He does not move. All of his blood seems to rush to the center of his body. He cannot look at her and he cannot look at the teacher, so he looks to the classroom’s east-facing windows, ablaze with light.

Her fingers are moving. A gentle clawing, prying, as though trying to find the softest spot on him to pierce. His mouth is full of saliva and he swallows it in a gulp. The chalk screeches when Mrs. O’Neil writes, in block capital letters, the word
LUST
on the board.

The windows. Patrick tries to concentrate on the windows. They glow orange, as though made of fire, as though the sun has pinpointed the room to burn through a magnifying glass. It is hot in here, terribly hot. And her hand, so dexterous, is unbuttoning his jeans, unzipping his fly, grabbing hold of him—he has never felt so hard, as if his skin might split, when she gives him first an appreciative squeeze and then a caress that takes in the length of him.

The students around them hurry their pens across their notebooks and Mrs. O’Neil scratches her chalk across the board and her shadow capers along the wall, like a dancing crow, and the dust motes twirl in the sunbeams cutting through the window and the girl moves her hand faster now, and faster yet, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her arm appearing still, all of the movement in her fingers, her wrist—and Patrick can feel the building pressure, can feel himself losing control, can feel the heat of the sun inside of him, the wonderful heat, and the sudden pressure that gives way to a loosening, a surge.

He coughs into his fist when he finishes. He can’t not make noise.

While he sits there—his posture slumped, his breath whistling fiercely through his nose—she wipes her palm on his jeans, retrieves her pen, and begins to take notes. He watches her hand, its glossy fingernails, its faint green veins, for maybe five minutes, and then the bell rings and she rises from the table without a word or parting glance and leaves him.

Patrick takes his packed lunch to the gym, to the mirror-walled room with the rubber floor, located off the basketball courts. His father kept a bench and some dumbbells in their garage, and in the afternoons, they would lift together, not saying a lot except to shout encouragement on those final wobbly reps, simply taking pleasure in each other’s company. That used to be their routine anyway. His father, in the months leading up to his deployment, spent more and more time alone in his home-brew lab, more and more time on the phone with his friend Neal, an old college pal, now a researcher based out of the University of Oregon. They were working on something—that’s all his father would say—a biochem problem. Making beer better, Patrick assumed.

In the mirrors of the high school gym, Patrick sees himself reflected endlessly and imagines one of those far-off figures as his father when he works out—chins, benches, dips, rows, military presses, curls—as much as he can fit into thirty minutes, taking breaks between sets to snap bites from his apple.

He never asks anyone if it’s all right. And when he first senses a figure in the room—when he pumps away at the bench and hears the cludding footsteps, catches movement at the bottom of his eye, he guesses he’s in for a lecture.
You can’t be in here without a spotter,
the teacher, hands on hips, will tell him. Or,
You’re never going to fit in if you isolate yourself like this.

Patrick racks the weight and rolls into a seated position and sees, not a teacher, but a boy. He is tall and plump, baby faced, which makes it difficult to tell how old he is, fifteen, nineteen. His head is shaved-down brown bristle. He wears a white T-shirt tucked into khakis, combat boots. On the back of his hand, the bullet-shaped tattoo.

The boy stares, his eyes wide and damp and gray, but says nothing. A moment ago Patrick was thinking about the girl—about what compelled her to reach out for him, about how nothing like that has ever happened to him and whether it even happened, whether he imagined it, and what he should say the next time he sees her—and now this, all those good anxious thoughts interrupted by some skinhead who won’t blink.

Patrick doesn’t know what to expect, another fight maybe? But fights like an audience. Fights feed off the energy of a crowd. And they are alone except for their hundreds of reflections. Then what? Patrick grows tired of the staring contest, stands and slides on another twenty pounds of plates, and says, “You guys have some sort of problem with me?”

“We don’t have a problem with you, Patrick.” The boy’s voice has the surprising clarity and resonance of a radio announcer’s. An adult’s voice.

“Then what?”

His name is Max, he says, and he has some friends he wants
Patrick
to meet. “Let me ask you something,” Max says and shoves his hands in his pockets as though sleeving a weapon, offering a truce. “What are you doing this Friday?”

Nothing. He has nothing going on, but he doesn’t want to say as much. This might be a gesture or might be some kind of trap, him walking through a door to greet a roomful of guys swinging lead pipes and baseball bats. “Friday,” Patrick says. Friday there is no school for the full-moon Sabbath. A law that has been around so long no one knows its origin: nobody is to work, nobody is to go anywhere except in the case of an emergency. He says as much.

“You’re not a lycan,” Max says, “so what’s the problem?”

“No problem.”

Talking to girls has never come easily to him. Sometimes, at the mall, the bowling alley, a restaurant, he’ll dream up a bad line—“I’ve seen you around, right?” or “If I hear this song again, I might rip my ears off”—good enough to make them look his way, get them talking, but after that, he’s worthless, smiling, nodding his head, letting his eyes drop to his shoes. So usually he doesn’t bother.

She makes it easy on him, surprising him that afternoon, appearing out of the river of students flowing down the hall, her shoulder brushing up against his. “Did you hear a single thing Mrs. O’Neil was talking about today?” she says.

At first he has no words. He can only think of her hand, the heat and pressure of it. “Not really.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He tries to control his bewildered smile. He tries to come up with something more to say, but he is too busy studying her, her yellow V-neck and dark jeans slung so low he can see the blade of her hipbone.

“Did you even read the play?” she says.

“No.” He closes his eyes. That helps. “I want to. I just haven’t been able to concentrate.”

“Because of what you’ve been through.” Not a question.

“Yeah.”

He waits for her to give him a sympathetic nod, to touch him on the shoulder, to ask him a million questions about what it was like to hear all of those people dying around him while he hid under a body like a blanket. She doesn’t. He figures this is a good sign. “So you know me?”

“Everybody knows you, even if they pretend not to.”

Lockers slam. Voices call around them. Bodies mash them closer together. Every other hand with a cell phone in it. Patrick isn’t even sure where he’s going—he’s just walking.

She says something, but he doesn’t hear her. “Sorry?”

She leans in to his ear so that he can feel her breath. “You’re a celebrity.” She overenunciates the word, making it sound like many words.

He almost says, “I wish that wasn’t the case,” but doesn’t want to sound like a whiner. Instead he says, “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

She says her name and holds out a hand, the same hand, for a shake.

“Malerie?” he says.

“Malerie.”

“Malerie.”

“Yeah.”

He repeats the name three times, making it into a song.

“Is something wrong?”

“It’s just that I’ve never met anybody with that name, Malerie.”

They talk for another minute—about what, he isn’t sure—school probably, the town maybe. His mouth is moving and words are coming out of it. Then the bell rings.

He has never liked saying good-bye. On the phone, after someone says, “All right, I guess I got to—,” he throws out a question to keep the conversation going. And in person, after raising a hand to wave so long, he can never depart more than a few paces without looking back. It always surprises him how easily other people hurry away, their faces already different, walled off and occupied with the next place they will go, the next person they will meet.

But she is different. When he walks five steps, he pivots on his heel—not to stare at her ass, just to watch her, he likes watching her—and at that same moment, as though she can sense him, she slows her pace and turns and smiles but casts down her eyes as though he has caught her doing something forbidden.

“It’s French, you know,” she yells to him. “My name. It means bad luck!”

C
LAIRE FELT SO CLEVER
when she realized the note revealed a string of constellations. And she feels so stupid now, two weeks later, with no better understanding of what they mean, what her father was trying to tell her. She knows they can’t be directions—a map written in the night sky—for if she were to follow them, she would go nowhere, turning this way and that, wheeling along with the stars. She tries spitting out the names in a hurry—“Grus, Octans, Taurus, Orion”—thinking their sound might hold a secret. She brings the paper directly before her eyes and pulls it slowly away, as if a picture might reveal itself. She considers the mythology of each constellation, overanalyzing them like lines of some sonnet assigned to her in English. She scribbles out page after page of theories in her notebook—the one with the cartoon football on the cover—until her fingers ache from gripping the pen.

It’s enough to make her want to tear the note in half, and in half again, letting the wind carry the pieces away like the snow that fell the night this all began. And then, with her hands and her mind empty, she will crawl under some porch and curl up in a ball and close her eyes—which feel as poisoned as her wrist from staring endlessly at the note—and wait to die. That would be easier.

The landscape here is flat, parceled up into brown and yellow squares edged by barbed wire, so that Claire feels she is crossing a giant board game. The shape of the wind is visible in the fields of trembling wheat and soybeans that stretch to the horizon. Trees appear only when clustered around houses as a windbreak. The distance between towns grows greater. Yellow-bellied marmots poke their heads out of their burrows and chirp at her, as if to say,
Where do you think you’re going?
and
Why bother?

She has felt, these past few years especially, like the center of something. Her shoes mattered. Her jeans and jackets. Her grades. Her friends. Her text messages. Her opinions about movies and music and television shows. Her love and hate for certain boys. All of that is gone now. Especially in these northern plains, where the wind never stops blowing and the sky seems bigger than the ground beneath her feet, she feels smaller and more insignificant than ever before. A tiny harmless thing that could be swallowed up and no one would notice.

She asks for a ride outside a grocery store from a gray-haired, one-eyed woman pushing a shopping cart full of frozen dinners. She asks if she can sleep on the covered porch of a squat white house where four children race around the front yard, capturing grasshoppers to toss into a fat-bodied spider’s web. She asks for directions at the edge of a field where two men wearing seed caps and heavy leather gloves toss hay bales into the back of a pickup. But mostly she keeps to herself, afraid that someone will squint at her and say,
You’re that girl I heard about on the news?

Though she knows that’s unlikely. She has been reading the newspapers, stopping at convenience stores to scan the headlines. “Terror in the Skies,” “Lycan Terror Plot,” “The Terror Among Us,” they read. Photos of the wreckage outside Denver, the blackened metal, the scar charred into a wheat field. Photos of the planes in Portland and Boston, parked on the taxiway, the red and blue lights of dozens of emergency vehicles reflected on the fuselage. Photos of body bags organized in a long black row along the tarmac. Photos of mourners piled up against the hurricane fence, clutching it and each other, their faces crumpled like damp tissues. Photos of the boy—“the Miracle Boy”—his expression grainy, a blanket shrouding his shoulders, escorted by police. Photos of the dead, a special insert in
USA Today
memorializing them, their names, ages, hometowns, occupations, hobbies, surviving family. Three 737s—553 corpses.

Nothing about her.

American flags snap from every porch. Stars-and-stripes magnets decorate every bumper. And this morning, outside a McDonald’s, a man with a bucket and a sudsy scrub brush works over the brick exterior where someone has spray-painted
Eye for an eye, lycans should die
.

The kind of rhetoric she’s read about in books, seen in movies, heard about from her parents, but never experienced firsthand. She debates whether she should go in, the building seeming poisoned, but the smell is too good, the fryer grease making her mouth damp, and the day is so cold, chasing her into the warm, brightly lit space. She buys a large coffee—two creams, two sugars—and a Big Mac, large fries. She has never had a better meal in all her life.

She pulls from her backpack the
Bismarck Tribune
, found in a garbage can outside. Its paper retains the cold and carries it to her fingertips. She finds on the front page an article that makes her lean forward. “Retribution,” it reads, accompanied by a shot of the president standing before a black bouquet of microphones, talking about the “swift, severe, and immediate response taking place at this very moment.” He could not go into details, for fear of tipping off those they pursued, but the American public should rest easy knowing that several arrests had already been made and scores more would occur over the next few weeks. “This is not a time to panic,” he was quoted as saying. “This is not a time to lash out at our lycan neighbors, who live peacefully among us and who are registered and monitored and, with the help of strictly prescribed medication, have forgone their ability to transform. Remember that to be a lycan is not to be an extremist, and I would encourage patience among the public while the government practices its due diligence in pursuing those responsible for this terrible, unforgivable catastrophe.” This was followed by a small quote from a lycan-rights group claiming widespread harassment and persecution in the days following the attacks.

That was it. Nothing about a house stormed, semiautomatics barking, her parents killed. The men in the black cars and the black body armor were at Stacey’s house too, which means they were probably at other houses, maybe all across the country. She imagines a hundred doors kicked down, the noise like a hundred bones broken, and she imagines the Tall Man stepping through them all. Why wasn’t this news?

She doesn’t know where to go, so she goes nowhere, holing up for ten days in an abandoned motel on the outskirts of Fargo. The Seahorse Inn, it’s called, the paint a faded and peeling aquamarine. The parking lot is riven with weed-filled cracks. The windows are blinded by sheets of plywood. There are twelve rooms, all of them locked, but when she walks around back, she finds an open window, the plywood crowbarred off and tossed into the tall grass. She calls out, “Hello,” and hears no answer. She peers in the window for a long time, the threadbare curtain moving with the wind licking her cheek, until her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then she crawls in, stepping onto a cinder block, slinging her good arm over the sill. Her feet rattle against the many crushed beer cans that litter the floor. Keystone Light. She guesses some teenagers broke in and used the place to party. The wallpaper is patterned with sailboats and starfish. There are light squares on it where paintings used to hang. A hole punched through the drywall. A chair tipped over. The mattress stripped bare and stained with what she hopes is spilled beer. She knows sleep won’t come easily in a place like this, but it ranks better than the nights she has so far spent beneath porches and in barns, truck beds, old campers.

She can smell the mess in the bathroom before she steps into the dark cave, barely able to make out the dried fecal matter muddying the toilet. Someone has destroyed the mirror, and the thousands of shards glimmer faintly from the floor. She closes the door and wanders around the room again and shrugs off her backpack and decides to call this home for a little while at least.

She smells like herself. That’s what her father used to say after a long day of work, lifting his arm, sniffing: “I smell like myself.” She has washed daily in rivers, in rest-stop and convenience store bathrooms, but her clothes feel as oily as a second skin. And her wrist. The wrappings stink like congealed grease at the bottom of a pan after frying bacon. She continues to wrap more and more tape around it, sealing the tatters, creating a fat silver mitten. She has swallowed her way through a bottle of ibuprofen, and though the pain has ebbed, she gets a fresh jolt now and then when she bangs her arm against something.

She has learned to do everything with one hand—eating, tying her shoes, unbuttoning her pants—her other hand uselessly tucked into her coat pocket. She tries to concentrate on the letter, to break its code, but after all this time without success, her mind wanders easily. She finds herself zoned out and staring at the wall, thinking about how much she misses her phone, how she once made a birdhouse from a dried and hollowed gourd, how one September a cold front blew through northern Wisconsin and dropped the temperature into the single digits, and when she and her parents drove to Loon Lake and clambered out on the ice and augered holes and arranged their tip-ups, the ice was so clear they could see the walleye and smallmouth and sunfish whirling beneath their boots.

She knows the cold is coming. Severe cold that will blacken fingers and make teeth chatter so violently they shatter. The weathermen love to talk about Fargo, a place where you can hurl a glass of water into the air and watch it vanish, leave out a banana overnight and use it to hammer a nail into a plank of wood.

She can’t stay here long. Every day she climbs out the window of the Seahorse Inn and wanders the town—and every day the grass grows browner, the tree branches grow barer, until they appear skinned, their leaves clattering along the streets. She has bought a black knit cap from Walmart to fight the deepening chill. Her mind circles around the letter as her body circles stores and neighborhoods, and more than once her steps slow, nearly stop, as if a hard wind is trying to blow her back the way she came.

But what if she does go home? What waits for her there? She imagines walking through her darkened house, fingering the bullet holes in the walls, stepping around the puddles of blood dried into the linoleum. She imagines opening closets full of clothes no one will ever wear, bringing her parents’ pillows to her face to smell them, finding their hairs curled up in a brush.

Or not. Maybe they aren’t dead. Maybe they were only injured. Maybe the semiautomatics were shot in warning, into the ceiling, chunks of drywall snowing around them. Maybe, if she found a pay phone and dialed 911 and gave herself up, maybe then she would see them, as soon as tomorrow. They would clutch each other in a holding area, tiles white and lit with fluorescent bulbs, the three of them laughing and crying with relief at the mix-up—because they hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t done anything. Right?

Or she could visit her nana. In the Sleepy Hollow Assisted Living Center. The Tall Man wouldn’t have bothered her, with one side of her face appearing melted, her words a mushy slur. And though the two of them had never gotten along, she was family—there was comfort in that—and maybe Nana knew something. Claire imagines the curl of a beckoning finger as the old woman leaned forward in her wheelchair to whisper a secret.

Or maybe she should go south, like the geese she sees cutting across the sky in the shape of spearheads, where she could walk barefoot on the beach and waitress at a restaurant with tiki torches flaming in the beer garden. Or maybe she should consult her horoscope, flip a coin, sit in the back pew of a church and pray. She can’t make up her mind, can’t trust herself, her mind like the sky, muddled up into a soupy gray cloud from which competing thoughts rain.

It takes her a long time to drop the quarter in the pay phone and dial her landline, but it takes only one ring for an automated voice to tell her this number is no longer in service. She hangs up, stares at the phone, then sinks another quarter into the slot and dials her father’s cell. After two rings, someone answers but says nothing. She can hear the person’s breath.

“Hello?” she says. “Mom? Dad?”

The breathing continues. Then comes the staticky pop of saliva as a mouth opens into a smile. The voice that speaks to her—a crisp baritone—isn’t one she recognizes, though it recognizes her. “Where are you, Claire?” it says.

The Tall Man. Who else could it be except him?

“Tell me where you are,” he says.

She slams down the phone with such force that it rings like a hammer striking an anvil.

Her nose burns and drips, her feet ache, and her fingers feel numb at the tips when she returns to the Seahorse Inn. She doesn’t understand what he wants from her. She doesn’t know whether he can find her now, whether the pay phone came up on the cell as unlisted, whether he can trace its origin. She doesn’t know whether she should leave immediately, but she knows she must leave.

When she drops through the window, she freezes in a half crouch. From somewhere in the room comes a rustling. And then silence. Her eyes adjust and distinguish in the gray light the black shapes of the desk, the chair, the bed. The beer cans are long gone, hurled into the woods. Her first instinct is to retreat, but she is too tired to leap again from a window into the black square of the night. And if she did, what then? Where would she run to this time?

She steps slowly forward, flat-footed, trying to distribute her weight, hoping the floor won’t creak beneath her. It takes her a minute to make her way around the bed, where the shadows pool, black and impenetrable.

She keeps a flashlight—a plastic two-dollar cheapie the size of a pen—in her pocket. She withdraws it now to click on and scare away the shadows. Nothing.

Then she hears it—a series of scrapes and clicks—the sound a skeleton might make if animated. The bathroom. Its door is open. Maybe from the wind, which funnels constantly into the room, fluttering the curtains, or maybe not.

As a child, maybe five or six or seven, she was once so afraid of the dark, so certain a pale-faced creature with long, bony fingers hid in her closet, that she wet herself rather than use the bathroom. She feels something similar—a bladder-bursting pressure—when she looks at the open bathroom door and imagines the possibilities that might lie concealed in the wedge of darkness. The Tall Man in his black suit. A mossy-toothed drifter with jigsaw tattoos covering his face. The ghosts of her parents, their arms encircling her like a cold mist.