Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  The last thing he wants to do is pull on his boots, zip up his jacket, head into the cold that made his nose run and his hands numb all day. He hired on a gang of Mexicans to help. To usher the cattle from the holding pen to the chute, to tighten the sidebars, to thrust the vaccine into the cows’ rumps—Scourguard 3KC to boost immunity before calving, Ivomec Plus for liver flukes, intestinal worms. The men’s faces were reddened from the weather when they waved their arms and clapped their hands and zapped the cows with electric prods—the cows snorting and trotting away from them, kicking up clods of dirt, stacking up at the far end of the lot.

  That’s all there is anymore for help—Mexicans. Used to be, he kept a hired man who lived on-site in a trailer. Then, ten years ago, when he hit sixty, when he decided to run for city council, he sold four hundred acres and as many head of cattle. His driveway is still flanked by pine columns with the Bar J brand chiseled into them, but as a hobby he keeps only a small herd on his twenty acres. When he needs help—with shots, with calving, with bucking alfalfa—he advertises in the classifieds, and the only ones who call have those drawn-out vowels, those sentences like songs he has trouble deciphering. “I don’t understand. Slower this time,” he often hears himself saying.

  The window has fogged over again. He lets the curtain swing shut. He flips on a tableside lamp, and then another, not liking how dark the living room suddenly feels, the pine paneling soaking up the light. He falls back into his recliner and pulls over his lap a stars-and-stripes blanket. He sips at his bourbon until the ice cubes rattle against his teeth and his face feels flushed. On television he half tunes in to the familiar footage of the planes and then the goddamn president giving another goddamn speech instead of doing something.

  Walt knows what he’d do. Right after the attacks, he brought to the city council an emergency proposal that would make public every registered lycan. Put it in the papers, he’d said. Put it on the Internet. Put it on their IDs, for God’s sake. That was the real no-brainer, something that had been discussed for years without success, a slot on the driver’s license, right next to blue eyes and brown hair: lycan.

  We need to know who we’re up against, he’d said. It was a bluff, completely illegal. He knew the needle-dick mayor would try to shame him. But he felt he needed to say what everybody else was too chickenshit to admit: humans and animals don’t mix and it was time to build some fences between the two, go back to the old ways. The Oregonian ran a condemning piece about Walt alongside the worst photo in world history, him with his mouth open, a gaping black hole to match his shadowy pocketed eyes.

  There comes a high-pitched bawling from outside. The noise a cow makes when dehorned or branded, when their black muzzles lift to the sky and their eyes bulge and roll back in their heads. Walt feels seized by it and goes utterly still as though waiting for the pain that caused the sound to arrive.

  Then it dies out. Walt utters a long string of curses and with some effort kicks down the leg rest and stands up, nearly tripping in the tangle of his blanket. He kicks it away and scrambles for the remote on the end table. He punches the power button. The image of the newscast falls into darkness. He can see himself reflected on the screen, standing and holding out the remote like a drawn pistol. His eyes are crinkled and buried in the folds of his face. His nose is like the head of a hammer. His hair is buzzed down to a silver brush. He might be old, but he can still do some damage. You bet.

  He drops the remote on the chair and heads to the kitchen. He could never find anybody worth marrying—that’s what he said whenever asked what’s kept him single all these years—but his home has no piles of rank laundry, no empty beer bottles lined up on the counter or stacks of dirty dishes moldering in the sink. The world is too messy; he wants his life clean. A place for everything and everything in its place: that was another thing he said.

  So he knows exactly where to find what he’s looking for, in this case a handgun. He keeps weapons throughout the house—a .22, three revolvers, even his father’s World War II bayonet—the nearest handgun hidden behind the cereal in the cupboard, a loaded S&W .357. He thumbs off the safety and snaps the lock on the door and swings it open. The noise comes rushing out of the night to greet him. Coyotes babbling. Hens squawking. Horses and cattle shrieking.

  In his surprise he brings the handgun to his ear. He hesitates a moment, one foot out the door, the other anchoring him to the kitchen. Then he casts off his surprise and joins the din by screaming, not a curse, but a garbled cry of anger. He stomps down the steps and along the path that leads to the barn, the ground biting his bare feet. In his hurry he has forgotten his boots and jacket. His breath clouds from his mouth—he is panting—but otherwise he feels oblivious to the cold. Warm even, with two tumblers of bourbon sloshing inside him.

  The moon hangs in the sky like a skull. In its pale light he circles the barn. Its panels shake, as if the building is stirring to life, from where the horses kick in their stalls. The noise—a zoo of noise—is such that he cannot think, can concentrate only on dragging his feet forward, maintaining his grip on the revolver. The air smells like alfalfa and musk and something sharper: copper.

  Next to the holding pen, a forty-by-forty-foot square encased by a split-rail fence, the sodium-vapor lamp hangs in the sky like a second moon. He lifts the bar to the gate and pushes his way into the holding pen and stumbles across the uneven, hoof-pocked ground. Earlier today he left behind a red heifer with a pale face who is too old to calf and who will be trucked off tomorrow to slaughter. No longer. Now, against the far edge of the pen, she lies on her side, her broad back to him. The ground is soft and steaming with her blood. His bare feet squelch through the mud to examine her. Two hundred and fifty pounds of packaged beef—gone.

  Walt has always been sensitive to high-pitched sounds. The coyotes are howling, their howls merging into one distressing note that trembles the air and sends Walt reeling. He drops to one knee to observe the heifer’s torso rent open, her slatted ribs like long teeth grinning at him from a bloody mouth. He remembers one afternoon when—after he lifted her tail and pushed his gloved hand into her, after he reached around the hot emptiness and determined she wasn’t carrying again, after he released her—she kicked the sidebars hard enough to dent the metal. No matter how old she was, she still had fight in her. A pack of coyotes couldn’t have done this.

  To steady himself he rests a hand on her sledgehammer-shaped head. The fading warmth of it makes him realize for the first time the cold. Maybe it is this that makes the revolver shake in his hand when he aims it into the darkness. His breath puffs out of him in white scarves. And he realizes that the night has gone quiet except for the lamp buzzing overhead.

  He does not hear the whispering tread of footsteps moving through cheatgrass or the groaning complaint of wood as something large clambers up the side of the corral, but he notices the shift in the light, and when he finally turns, the last thing he will see is the creature balanced on the fence post, like a gargoyle, its shape occulting the moon behind it.

  Chapter 8

  SOMETIMES 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 bo
dy 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.