Red Wolf Moon
P. Daniel Patrick
Red Wolf Moon
by P. Daniel Patrick
copyright 2011
Tommy leaned into the red glow of the soda machine giving his skin the appearance of baked flesh, bloodied and tortured from the sun.
He dropped the first set of change into the slot, fumbled to retrieve the soda can and greedily guzzled down the sticky-sweet drink. Sighing with relief, Tommy quickly purchased three more cans of soda, two for later, and popped the top on a third one. “Cause you never know when your going to get stuck in the middle of a god-forsaken desert when your car breaks down,” he muttered darkly.
Bleary-eyed, he shielded his eyes from the scorching desert sun and saw a cork board labeled Community Events. Plastered across the cork were identical bright red flyers: Red Wolf Moon Festival Tonight at Wolf Rock. Rolling his eyes Tommy stumbled from the cheap motel parking lot, past a new construction site with skeletal beams silhouetted against the blood red sand of the desert and crested the second floor.
He absently pushed a battered motel door open and loved what he saw. She was about his age; old enough to know better but not old enough to care. His eyes involuntarily hung on every curve and rounded every corner of her body. Her shoulder length red hair was still damp from the shower. Her complexion was porcelain white. A few delicate freckles traced across her face outlining her high cheek bones and full lips. Her hand hovered just over the knot in the bath towel, resting gently between her breasts, as if she was just about to take off her towel to get dressed. Then he looked up directly into her brilliant sapphire eyes shining brightly with amusement.
“Damn.”
Tommy realized that he was staring and didn’t care. Realized in that moment that he could stare into those eyes for a really long time. Get lost in those gems and never need more. Tommy felt a tugging need to move towards her, touch her, feel her.
For the briefest of moments Tommy could see the woman’s nostrils flare, as if she was inhaling his every scent. Breathing his essence in.
The ancient Shaman’s believed that you could capture a man’s soul by trapping his breath. At that moment Tommy felt captured and did not care. He was drawn in without hope. Scent filled the motel room, musty and pungent, redolent of sex. Tommy breathed in deeply without thinking, the edges around the woman seemed to blur and shimmer with a red haze. He could almost taste her fragrance in the air. Her scent was like wild things running in the night.
Entranced, Tommy took a step closer. Then two. Then three. Her warm breath felt hot with need against his skin. His flesh tingled with expectation. She breathed in again. Her nostrils flared and a ragged breath escaped the full curve of her ruby lips.
A car horn shattered the trance into shards all around them.
Shaking his head Tommy looked down and realized for the first time that his hand was raised touching hers. Shocked, Tommy pulled back his hand like the woman was on fire and stumbled backward, unsure about what just happened. Tommy didn’t like to be surprised, to be out of control. Backing away he moved to leave.
Regret can be a special kind of hell, he thought.
Pausing, Tommy turned back and tried to shake off that strange need rising deep inside of him, clear his mind.
“I’m Tommy, sorry to barge in on you like this.”
The woman took a quick step back, like she was trying to steady herself.
“Jenni. Damn boy you know how to make an entrance.”
Tommy grinned at this and thought, what the hell? “Look, can I make it up to you, buy you lunch.”
Jenni took a moment as if she was appraising Tommy. Then she closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. A coy quirk of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.
“Sure,” she said. “Coffee house down the street. Give me twenty. Now get the hell out of my room.”
Tommy left her room grinning and never saw the small, mysterious smile steal across her face as he left
He realized he hadn’t eaten since his car had broken down yesterday. Tommy found the coffee shop easily, only one in town, and went in immediately regretting it. A thick plume of sickly sweet smoke filled the small coffee house. Tommy looked around coughing and saw an ancient looking Native American sitting rigid in a lounge chair like one of those wood statues you use to find outside of an old barber shop. His silver grey hair was long and clipped in the back with a turquoise clasp shaped like a wolf. His dark face was creased with grooves as bottomless as the Grand Canyon and his deep set eyes were closed, forming crow’s feet on either side of his eyes.
But what was most remarkable about him were his eyebrows. They were the bushiest eyebrows, check that, eyebrow, Tommy had ever seen. Because it was a uni-brow in the truest sense of the word, that connected one temple to the other, like a giant caterpillar that had crawled onto his face and taken residence just above his eyes. The Indian sat so still that the lone reason Tommy knew he wasn’t a wooden barbershop statue was the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest as he sucked smoke in from the hand-rolled cigarette and out through a thin crack between his lips.
“Old Indian proverb,” the Indian said.
Tommy had to do a double take. As far as he could tell the man’s eyes were still closed. How the hell could he see me, he wondered.
Excuse me, Tommy said.
“Old Indian proverb,” The Indian said again and cracked his eyes open, gracing Tommy with a wicked looking stare, like a rattler before it strikes its prey. “Man who stares gets his eyes sucked out and fed to him on a stick.”
Tommy backed up, startled, and reached for the door.
“Frank, you leave that boy alone you weathered old fart. He’s almost a paying customer if you don’t scare him away.”
“Ah, I was only screwin’ with him, Daisy.” The weathered Indian replied and grinned at Tommy with a mouthful of tobacco stained crooked teeth. “Not that often we get a new boy in here I can mess with.”
Daisy stood behind the counter and was filling up coffee mugs for the few customers sitting on bar stools. She wore a pale yellow waitress dress that fit a little to snugly around her more than generous frame. The grease-stained apron she wore around her waist would have been thrown out, stomped on, and burned by fashion critics for accentuating her more than ample hips and waist. She was a brute of a woman who looked like she would have been more comfortable riding on a hog with the Hell’s Angels than serving coffee in the middle of the desert.
“Well just keep your ol’ Indian proverbs to yourself. And put that damn thing out will you. You’ve been smoking non-stop for three hours now. I can’t damn well see two feet in front of me.”
Half turning to Tommy she smiled while pouring another cup of coffee.
“Come on in honey, that old wolf don’t bite too hard no more.”
If she had the body of a Hell’s Angel, then her face was that of a cherub straight from heaven. When she smiled her chubby cheeks formed perfect rosy circles under her eyes that shone with mirth and smart humor.
“I’ve got another pot of coffee brewing up right now and some fresh cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven.”
Tommy looked to her, then back down at Frank, who was still staring at him with that maniacal, yellow-toothed grin, and cautiously sat down at the coffee-stained counter.
The coffee was as black as death and as strong as love. Put hair on your chest his dad use to say when he added double the amount of grounds needed in the coffeemaker.
Tommy looked around the coffee shop, deliberately avoiding any eye contact with the old wolf dutifully smoking another hand-rolled cigarette in the corner. There were three other people in the coffee house besides Daisy and Frank. Next to him at the counter sat two men, one African American and one white,
with those hard to miss neon yellow construction worker hats sitting next to them.
They must be working at the construction grounds I saw earlier, Tommy thought.
Behind him, sitting alone in a booth was a petite pretty blonde girl daintily picking away at a country fried steak. She had on colorful nurse’s scrubs, bright pink ponies and brown puppies chasing each other through a miasmically cheerful field of daisies.
“Hey sweetcakes,” one of the construction workers called out to Daisy. “You wanna go up to Wolf Rock with me tonight? I’ll show you how a real wolf does it in the wild.”
“Honey,” Daisy turned around and glared at the white construction worker with her broad hands planted squarely on her rotund hips. “I don’t see any r-e-a-l wolves around here, do you?”
“Maybe not,” the construction worker said, “but you ain’t seen his hairy highness yet!”
“I better not see his hairy highness ever in this life, cause if I do he’ll be a head shorter for the meeting.” Her eyes reflected brightly against the stainless steel butcher knife she was chopping carrots with.
The man looked at the behead carrots, turned a little pale and looked down, seemingly intent on divining his hairy highness’ chances for survival in the coffee grounds at the bottom of his mug.
“Hey Daisy”, the construction worker’s friend pitched in, trying to save what was left of his friend’s pride. “You know how all the Hollywood movies like to show werewolves feeding on young, attractive virgins? Well you ever wonder why you don’t see any werewolves around anymore?”
Pause for effect.
“They all starved to death!”
That one pulled a groan from everybody in the coffee house. The other construction worker perked up and said, “A werewolf goes into the park and starts hitting on the first girl he sees. ‘Hey there, good looking,’ he says. ‘No not you,’ he says to the jogger: “your dog.”
The two men started shooting volleys of bad werewolf jokes at each other like champions at a tennis match. Tommy just listened while Daisy pushed a steaming fresh cinnamon roll under his nose and rolled her eyes.
“What do werewolves call runners?”
“Fast food.”
“Doctor says to the werewolf, you know your arteries are clogged? Do you eat a lot of fat?”
“Yeah,” the werewolf replies. “The skinny people run too fast!”
“Werewolves do it in shifts baby!”
At that Tommy saw Frank waggle his bushy eyebrows at Daisy with which she returned the favor by waggling her favorite finger back at him.
Tommy started to join in with the group until suddenly he experienced the uncomfortable realization that he was the only one laughing. The coffee house was entombed in silence. The moon cast an eerie red haze through the window and bathed the inhabitants of the coffee house in a blood red glow that accentuated the harsher edges and dark shadows lurking in every corner.
It was like a sudden flicker in reality, from one plane of existence to another, utterly more disturbing and in ways shockingly more revealing.
Startled Tommy looked around at the panorama and saw that the construction workers had their mugs raised only half way to their gaping mouths, like a toast aborted. Both of Daisy’s hands clutched her apron, her face was limp and placid. Tommy turned and stared at the nurse. A fist-sized chunk of raw and bloody steak was hanging from between her clenched teeth.
Why the hell hadn’t I noticed her eating raw steak, Tommy thought numbly.
He stared transfixed as the nurse’s lips bared to the top of her gums and then beyond the boundaries of her mouth, her teeth wicked and sharp. Rivulets of blood ran down her once delicate cheek.
“The moon is hungry,” Frank growled with a guttural, low voice.
Moonlight seeped through the window and highlighted him with that same eerie red haze.
In the beat of a heart each head turned and stared directly at Tommy. The nurse violently shook the limp steak between her teeth, seemingly unsatisfied with its death until she had broken its spine for herself. The construction workers each bared their teeth in matching menacing grotesque grins. Daisy reached over and contemplated the sharp edge of her butcher knife. Frank slowly stood and stretched his back, Tommy felt, rather than heard, each vertebrate popping violently in succession. All humor had vanished from his face, replaced with a wicked, hungry visage; each groove in his face drawing a sharp edge leading from his mouth and out, transforming his face into line after line of jagged serrated teeth.
Then reality flickered again and Tommy was back in the smoky but ordinary smoke-filled haze of the coffee house. Everybody was laughing like before, seemingly unaffected by the shift that Tommy experienced. Tommy felt like he was suffocating. The smell of burnt coffee, the sickly sweet smell of the cinnamon roll, the pungent aroma of Frank’s hand-rolled cigarettes preyed upon Tommy’s senses until he felt like he was drowning in the desert.
Air. Need air, Tommy gasped in his mind. Quickly Tommy reached into his pocket and threw twenty too much on the counter and ran out the door slamming it behind him.
Confused and frightened, Tommy stumbled down the sidewalk of main street. Shadows crossed the night sky and crept across the pavement. He looked up and saw the defeated sun sinking into a pool of blood as the full moon rose victoriously bathed in glorious crimson light.
Tommy couldn’t get the scene from the coffee shop out of his head. It was like a hallucination. But there was something that rang infinitely true about what he saw as well. As if that was the stark, harsh reality and everything else; all the laughter, was just a thin veneer, a final defense to hold back the darkness within.
Still lost in the chaos of thought Tommy glimpsed a welcome sight, Jenni. Well, all that he could see of her were those incredible legs resting themselves outside the open door of a night-black, soft top 1969 Cadillac Convertible. The long slender legs shone pearl white like a beacon in the night against the obsidian metallic finish.
The first thought that struck him like an arrow through the heart was, damn, I’d recognize those legs anywhere. Tommy was a leg man. No doubt about it. The second, admiring the caddy. Damn, she has taste.
Thoughts about the strange vision in the coffee shop dispersed like misty vapors from his mind, replaced by the warm, comforting sensation her presence filled him with. Jenni, the sound tasted good on his tongue.
Jenni was leaning back against the leather upholstery of the caddy, reading a paperback horror novel. She was wearing a fitted floral print sun dress with a short skirt that rested lazily at mid-thigh. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Her voice silken smooth.
Before he formed his first word, she stood up out of the caddy and place two soft fingers on Tommy lips. “Shhh,” she whispered from full lips.
“You know, if you’re going to come into a girl’s room while she’s undressed, you should at least have the good grace to get undressed too.”
She graced him with those brilliant blue eyes shimmering in the moonlight.
Tommy was speechless.
She took her hand away and laughed. “Relax, boy, tell me your story,” and he did.
Tommy recounted the previous day’s events and how we was heading out to California to celebrate graduation from undergrad and broke down in the desert. Tommy was amazed to see Jenni listening and asking questions with genuine interest. He never lost track of those sapphire eyes the whole conversation.
“You have to be the first visitor this town has had since I moved here.”
“You live out here?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah, just moved out here with a whole bunch of other people from Yuma. Trying to fix the place up, town building you know. Most of us are still living in the hotel. We’re kind of a close-knit community but we liked the place and were trying to make it home”.
Great Tommy thought, hot and in a cult.
Jenni must have read the thoughts as they crossed his mind like the headlines on the front page of the daily paper.
/> “ I’ve got some Kool-Aid in the trunk and an extra white robe you can borrow.” She said grinning wickedly.
Tommy hesitated and then laughed at the joke. She’s got a good sense of humor too. I like that.
“No, seriously, we’re a lot like a family. We stick together for protection and because we honestly enjoy being with each other. A lot of my friends thought that the great Stone Wolf was a good portent for us, whatever that means. That’s how we ended up in this town.” Jenni pointed up just as the moon was ascending.
Looking up Tommy could see that the town of Red Wolf was nestled deep in a red rock valley between two imposing cliffs of stone. At the end of the valley was an incredible view of a flattop mesa surrounded by red-rimmed cliffs that seemed to melt with the red of the waning day.
Three bright red hills jutted high above the landscape overlooking the valley. The narrow hill on the left formed the wolf’s lower jaw; it was lower and at a slight angle to the center narrow hill that formed the wolf’s snout. From the base of the snout the final hill gave a generous curve to the right and then disappeared straight down into the desert landscape forming the wolf’s eye and long neck. The Red Wolf was like a great stone god overlooking his dominion far below.
Looking down from the stone wolf-god, Tommy’s eyes followed Main Street lolling like a ruddy red tongue down from the mountain and straight through Red Wolf. On either side of Main Street faded clapboard shops with dusty windows stood like shards of broken and crooked teeth. The effect was eerie. It was like staring into the gaping maw of a hungry beast.
“Damn,” he breathed, “I hadn’t seen that before.”
Tommy glanced and saw a wrenching sadness pass across Jenni’s face and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Later on Tommy would remember this moment when his feelings for Jenni switched from carnal to something deeper. He had only met this girl twice. He really didn’t know anything about her. But there had been enough. Her humor and wit. Her style and the caddy. Her boldness and vulnerability. He liked her. He didn’t know all of the implications yet of what that meant, but with a surprise he realized that whatever he had been looking for in California wasn’t really there. Here, in this place, with this woman, was where he wanted to be. Tommy smiled. Funny how life works out, isn’t it?
Red Wolf Moon Page 1