Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  A parade of semitrailers motored by and she could feel the drivers’ eyes on her. Twenty yards ahead, one of the trucks pulled over with a chirp of air brakes and clicked on its hazards. The passenger door kicked open, and when she walked by it, a man was leaning out, a thin-faced man with a gray goatee, asking if she needed a ride.

  “No,” she said automatically. She looked down the road as though her ride might come around the bend any minute now, then back at him. The cab of the truck, high above her, was brightly lit and seemed as big as a house. She imagined it was warm too. “I don’t know.”

  He regarded her and chewed at his lower lip. “Look. I got a daughter about your age, and if I saw her walking around a place like this, middle of the night and all, I’d want her to get home.”

  When he said that, she felt at once horribly depressed and comforted. She wanted to tell him everything, to let it out in a sobbing gush. Instead she said, in a small voice that barely carried over the noise of the engine, “I can’t go home.”

  He dropped his head in consideration and then looked at her sadly from under his eyebrows. “Then I’d want her to get herself someplace safe.” He laid his hand on the door handle and pulled it inward an inch. “Your decision.”

  She knew she could overpower him if she had to—assuming he didn’t have a gun—though she couldn’t imagine her body suffering through another transformation. She decided to trust him. She needed to trust somebody right now. She took a deep, steadying breath and climbed into the cab.

  It smelled like chewing tobacco and stale French fries. He gave her a long look that at first disturbed her, until he said, “You okay?” He tapped at his own forehead while looking at hers. She pulled down the visor and flipped open the mirror and gasped at her reflection. Her face was purpled, bruised from the transformation—she expected that—but not the blood, the smattering of scabs along her cheeks, the raised wormlike gash on her forehead.

  “I fell,” she said and spit on her thumb to wipe away what she could.

  He put the truck into gear and the truck groaned forward. The CB radio was busy with jabbering conversation, and he clicked it off, its noise replaced by a country song playing quietly from the radio. He cranked up the heat and said, “Here,” tossing his jacket onto her lap.

  When he asked where she was headed, she said she didn’t know. He shook his head but didn’t say anything more as they drove on—along a series of narrow roads, through a maze of warehouses, under a graffiti-painted bridge, finally pulling onto a ramp and grinding up to speed as they filed onto the interstate, surprisingly busy for the hour. The dashboard clock read 3:03. Her wrist throbbed. She felt weighed down with exhaustion. She felt safe in the truck, surrounded by so much steel. She liked being up so high. From here, if she squinted her eyes, the lights of the city glowed like stars, the strip malls and neighborhoods like distant galaxies, and soon her eyes shuttered closed completely and she fell asleep.

  He made stops all through the early morning, at grocery stores and drugstores and gas stations, leaving her in the cab with the engine idling, hauling up the rear door, yanking out the gangplank, dollying crates of milk. She examined her wrist at one point—swollen an angry red and run through with a blackened stripe—and then she blearily peered out the window and fell back into her empty dreams. Eventually the sun rose and reddened the sky and they parked behind a Mega supermarket, and when the man climbed out and slammed the door, she woke with a start and remembered the envelope.

  It was wrinkled and warm from its time in her pocket. She ripped it open and found money. Two hundred dollars in twenties. And a letter. If you could call it that. A lined piece of paper dotted with pencil marks, hundreds of them, in a seemingly random design. Her father loved puzzles and games and she knew immediately this was one of them. Not out of playfulness, but because he believed someone else might come upon the note. The men in the black cars. Her skin tightened and her hair pricked. She could feel them out there—hunting her. She wondered for how long.

  She studied the paper and moved her lips as though trying to sound something out. But her mind was too gummed up with panic and exhaustion, and in the few minutes before the man returned she couldn’t make sense of its cipher.

  His name was Elwood, he finally told her. “Tenaya,” she said, and they shook hands, which felt so silly after the hours they had already shared. She didn’t know why she lied about her name—but the lie felt right and she had once read a book by a woman named Tenaya and liked it.

  They stopped at a McDonald’s and he bought two breakfast meals, and she chewed through her egg sandwich and hash browns so quickly that he offered her his as well. She thought that sadness was supposed to ruin an appetite, but she felt terribly hungry and wanted only to stuff herself as if to fill some gulf inside her. She tried to save her crying for when she was alone in the cab, but sometimes she couldn’t hold the tears in, so she turned her face to the window. He never said anything, but at one point she noticed on the console next to her a box of tissues where none had been before.

  By noon she had cried herself dry and her thoughts sharpened into questions. Why her parents? And Stacey’s family? And however many other lycans? They had done nothing. They had no connection to the plane attacks. They belonged to a co-op. They drove a Prius, for God’s sake. They were talkers. They hated the government—they hated the U.S. occupation of the Republic—but they had never taken any action outside of circulating petitions, holding protest signs on downtown corners. And then she remembered her father’s words: “There are things you don’t know.”

  Maybe the answer was in the letter.

  When they parked at the travel plaza in Frazee, Minnesota, Elwood left his hand on the gearshift and said, “End of the road.” He lifted his eyebrows expectantly. “Unless you want to head back to Twin Cities?”

  She did not.

  “Didn’t think so.”

  She had been using his jacket as a blanket, and when she tried to hand it back, he shook his head, told her to keep it. “Somebody looking for you?” he asked, and when she did not respond he blew out a sigh and said, “You be careful. And you stay off the interstate if you don’t want to get found.”

  It isn’t until he drives away—the gray exhaust rising from the truck’s bullhorn pipes—that she realizes she forgot to thank him. She lifts a hand as the truck departs, growing smaller in the distance, and she hopes he sees the gesture in his mirror. Then she turns around in a circle and feels lost and utterly alone, realizing she has no one to trust, nowhere to go.

  The gas station is part of a larger travel plaza. There is a Subway attached to it and a video-game parlor she can see flashing through the windows. The parking lot is busy with cars and trucks, people pumping gas, cracking open sodas, sipping from steaming mugs of coffee. An SUV beeps its horn and the driver irritably lifts his hand off the wheel and she realizes she is in the way, standing in the middle of the lot, in the middle of all this traffic.

  She starts toward the store, her wrist pulsing with every step, and when she pushes through the door, a bell chimes. One thing at a time, her mother always said. She tries to wrap her head around a plan. She needs a bathroom, a map, some ibuprofen and food. She can manage that at least. The rest can wait.

  Behind the register stands a heavy woman with black roots showing through her bleached-blond hair. She stares a beat too long and Claire feels a surge of panic, wondering if her face has appeared on television, if the woman recognizes her. It seems impossible, but so does everything that has happened to her.

  Once in the bathroom, she feels encouraged by her reflection in the mirror. She looks like hell. Her hair—which has always been a problem, a wavy blond tangle she conditions and straightens every morning—is snarled up in every direction. Her face looks like a piece of old, darkened fruit. And then there is the gash across her forehead, a second mouth. Who wouldn’t stare?

  The daisy-patterned linoleum, peeling up at the corners, is littered with cigarette butts
and toilet paper confetti. It is a four-stall bathroom, and as women walk in and out, their voices chattering, their eyes lingering on her, she tries to pay them no mind, draping her jacket over the paper-towel dispenser, tearing off a long sheet, dampening it, frothing it up with soap. She cleans up as best she can.

  The travel mart has bins of five-dollar DVDs, open-air coolers full of cheese and sausage, racks of T-shirts with eagles and wolves silk-screened across them, display cases full of lacquered log clocks, and several grocery aisles crowded mostly with chips, pretzels, cookies, and candy. She selects an off-brand backpack from a rack, unzips its mouth, braces its strap in the crook of her elbow, and begins to stock up. A Rand McNally road atlas, ibuprofen, tampons, a blister pack of pens, a notebook with a cartoon football on its cover, two wolf T-shirts, duct tape, a bag of jerky, a box of granola bars, a bottle of Coke. And a newspaper, its headlines concerning the terrorist attacks.

  She tries to smile at the woman behind the register—tries not to wince when she jars her wrist with the backpack, lifting it onto the counter—and when she has finished paying, nearly a third of her money spent, she says thank you in a voice that needs a glass of water.

  She heads toward town, the cluster of buildings and trees a half mile down the road, the only variation in a landscape otherwise sprawling with corn and soybeans. This is the kind of country, her father used to say, where you could watch your dog run away for three days. Used to say. Because he wouldn’t say again. He wouldn’t say anything ever again. Neither would her mother. The dead didn’t speak. She knows she will never see them again.

  The day is warming up and she is thankful when she steps into the shade thrown by the knuckly oak trees lining this main street, the older Victorian and Colonial homes set back on browning lawns. The occasional car whooshes by, but otherwise, it seems like a quiet place, where nothing horrible could ever happen. The houses are soon replaced by small businesses. Next to a steepled church sits a small park with paths running through it and a play structure in its center. The trees are big here, some of their gnarled branches as wide as a man’s middle. She circles them, collecting several smaller branches knocked down by the wind. Two girls in bright floral dresses play on the swings while their mother watches. At a nearby picnic table, an older woman, dressed in black rags, rocks back and forth, the town crazy. Claire finds a bench and scares off a squirrel before taking a seat. Out of her bag she pulls the ibuprofen. She pinches the bottle between her thighs and clumsily pulls off the cap, then punches through the foil and washes down three pills with a gulp of Coke.

  Next she withdraws a wolf T-shirt and duct tape. She takes off her jacket and slides back her shirtsleeve to the elbow. Over her arm she pulls the T-shirt, a child’s small, running her thumb through a sleeve and her fingers through the neck, flopping the shirt over several times, wrapping the material tight around her arm.

  She then lays the sticks across her forearm, two of them pressed tightly together, hoping to make a splint. But when she reaches for the duct tape, her arm wobbles and the sticks fall out of place. And when she tries the duct tape, using her fingers, and then her teeth, to unpeel a long strip of tape, she only ends up tearing and twisting it. “Damn it,” she says and almost hurls the tape away to strike a squirrel or robin. It’s heavy in her hand, as though made of metal, and she bets it could do some damage. That might make her feel better.

  Instead she looks around for help. The mother and her children are already gone, the girls skipping down a distant sidewalk, which leaves the old woman sitting ten yards away, staring off into nothing, rocking back and forth as though lost in the rhythm of a prayer.

  “Excuse me,” Claire says. The woman makes no response, so she yells this time, “Excuse me!”

  The woman goes still and glances in Claire’s direction. She could be fifty or could be seventy—it is hard to tell. Her hair is dishwater gray and cut choppily around her ears, her skin deeply wrinkled from too much sun. Claire says, “I need some help. Can you help me?”

  The woman nods and mutters something under her breath, then rises with some difficulty and totters like a vulture over to where Claire sits. An unwashed smell comes off her. Her eyes appear filmed completely over with cataracts. And her smile, if that’s what it is, has holes in it from her missing teeth. “Need help,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “I can help. What help do you need? Tell me. Tell me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The woman says her name is Strawhacker, Ms. Strawhacker, and Claire addresses her as such and explains what to do, how to slowly spin the duct tape around the splint, beginning at her elbow, moving forward to her wrist, finally knotting it between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Why not a doctor?” The woman, Strawhacker, touches Claire’s knee. “A doctor is what you need, dear. A good cast. Not sticks and tape.”

  “That’s not an option,” she says in a dead voice that quiets the woman, makes her peer around and lick her lips and finally say all right, all right. How she can see, Claire doesn’t know, the cataracts like puddles of old milk. Her knuckles are swollen, but she moves nimbly enough, uncurling the tape, around and around Claire’s arm, making a mummy of her. “Like this?” the woman says, speaking to herself. “Yes. Yes. Good.” Claire tells her to do it again, and then again, three times over, until her arm feels properly armored.

  When they are finished, Claire pulls her sleeve down, so that the only visible part of the makeshift cast is a silvery mitten with a bit of white padding peeking out from beneath.

  “There now,” Strawhacker says. “Not bad.”

  Claire thanks her and expects Strawhacker to leave, to return to her picnic table and resume her rocking trance, but she does not. She remains seated on the bench, staring at Claire with her milky eyes, smiling softly. Then she reaches out a hand and lays it on hers, a hand as dry as paper. At first Claire thinks she means to shake, to wish her well. Instead she says, “Your fortune?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can tell it. I tell fortunes. With cards, tea leaves, palms. Would you like that? For me to read your fortune? Something to pass the time.”

  “I guess.”

  “Yes, because everyone likes to hear their fortune. Everyone does.” She begins to run a fingernail along Claire’s palm, tracking the lines. “But once your future is spoken, you cannot stop it from happening.”

  Then no, Claire decides, wrenching away her hand and tucking it into her armpit as though scalded. She’d rather not. Thank you.

  It’s easier not to think about the future—it’s easier to think of her palm as blank. The future is an ambush. The future is pain and absence. She has decided she can only bear to look a mile down the road, to think in terms of minutes instead of years. What am I going to eat, where am I going to sleep, how am I going to escape the rain? That’s the only future she’s interested in right now.

  The woman leans closer, her hair a nest around her shriveled face. “Will you at least tell me your sign, then?”

  “Aries.”

  Her face bunches up in a smile and she pats Claire on the thigh and stands wobbling upright. “That’s good,” she says. “This will be a good month for Aries. Your planet is in a good place.”

  Then it strikes Claire, the answer. She prays fiercely that she is right. The lines on her palm like the lines in the sky. The lines of a constellation. She hurries the letter out of her jacket pocket and unfolds it, smooths out its wrinkles with her palm. Her mind is like a spider weaving together the dots on the page with gossamer threads, uniting them as constellations. Yes. She doesn’t know why she didn’t recognize them before. Probably because she was out of her head with pain and fear and grief and exhaustion, but also because the constellations appear so out of context on lined paper, black instead of bright, small instead of far-flung in the night.

  She rips a pen out of its packaging and begins to connect the dots, sketch out their designs. Grus. Octans, Taurus. What they mean, she doesn’t know. But
at least a trapdoor has opened in the sky and she was lucky enough to fall through it.

  In her excitement, Claire has forgotten about the old woman, who hobbles closer and gestures with her crooked hand. “What are you drawing, dear?”

  “My future,” Claire says.

  Chapter 7

  WALT PULLS ASIDE the curtain and cups his hands around his eyes and leans into the dark window. Something has spooked the cattle. His hearing isn’t what it used to be, he’ll admit, which means they must be making quite the ruckus if he can make out their mewling and bawling over the television. His breath fogs the window and he swipes a hand through it, smearing his vision of the night. He cannot see anything, not from here, but beyond the barn and the corrals, dust rises like smoke through the blue cone of light thrown by the sodium-vapor lamp. He imagines he can feel a tremor in the air, hooves thudding in the pasture.

  There. Three sharp barks. Followed by yammering. Coyotes. This sort of thing happens often enough—the coyotes seeming to outnumber people in Central Oregon—that he isn’t concerned so much as he is annoyed. Beyond the barn stands a whitewashed coop fenced in by chicken wire that runs three feet into the ground to keep the coyotes from digging their way in after prowling near for a sniff. He imagines coyotes, like gray phantoms, circling the enclosure, and the chickens clucking in a panic, nervously fluttering their wings, filling the coop with a cloud of thrown feathers.

  He could take a rifle out on the porch, fire three rounds into the sky. Or stamp down the steps and into the night to pursue any that linger near the coop, the barn. But he has had a long day—leading cattle down the chute, punching them with a vaccination gun—and up until a moment ago he was half-asleep in his La-Z-Boy, sipping a tumbler of bourbon, watching Fox News.