“It’s French, you know,” she yells to him. “My name. It means bad luck!”
Chapter 9
CLAIRE 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 e
bbed, 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.
Her voice is rusty when she says, “Come out of there.”
As if in response the wind dies out, and in the silence that follows she can hear a faint clicking. She has no gun, only the ability to let the wolf turn over inside her, which feels impossible to someone in her condition, half-alive with grief and exhaustion.
A scritching now—she hears it—followed by the rustle of what could be cloth.
Enough. She hurries forward and raises her flashlight. The weak yellow light seeps into the bathroom but fails to penetrate a shadow darker than the rest. Its eyes flash red. A crow, she realizes, as it lets out a screech and leaps from its perch on the toilet. Its wings beat the air and its claws rake at her and she swings her arm and her flashlight goes whirling off and for a moment she is uncertain which way is up or down, left or right, with the crow screeching and flapping its wings and crashing off the walls, finally escaping through the open window.
She is huddled on the floor. She laughs and the laugh cracks into a sob.
She and her father used to count crows. For the times they spotted the birds roosting in a tree, wheeling in and out of low-hanging clouds, he taught her an old Irish rhyme. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that’s never been told. “Seven. That’s the one I want,” he used to say, squinting up at the sky. “I want that story.”
Anything but one. If they spotted a single crow, they would look around hurriedly, seeking another—as she does now, finding nothing but shadows all around her.
She packs what little she has and hikes her way out of town. A drop of rain strikes her cheek, and then another, and another still, and through the thickening downpour, she hurries to the nearest building, a Tesoro gas station, to wait out what she hopes is a passing storm.
She spins the card rack and chooses one at random. Its cover is cartooned with a baby in a sagging soiled diaper, a scab-kneed toddler picking her nose, a teenage boy clutching a sandwich and wearing sunglasses, a raggedy dog and spectacled grandparents, an
d, in the middle of them all, a bald middle-aged man in a white undershirt that can’t contain his potbelly. Inside, MOM—an acronym for Mother of Multiples—and a message from the sender, presumably a husband: Thanks for taking such good care of us.
Claire reads her way through all the cards, imagining whom she might send them to, and then wanders to the magazine rack and flips through a copy of People. Here is a shot of a starlet rising out of the ocean with her bikini dragged off her by a wave, a black censor bar covering her breasts. Oops is the caption. Claire wants to be interested—wants to read the articles as she would gobble candy—but part of her knows that her days of gossiping about celebrity nonsense are over.
Rain lashes the window. Out of the windswept murkiness comes a police cruiser, turning off the highway, into the parking lot, the tires splashing through puddles and throwing up fans of water.
Claire blindly sets the magazine on the rack and doesn’t pick it up when it flutters to the tile floor. Surely, she thinks, this is a sign, when a moment later the door chimes as the trooper pushes through it. He has the beginnings of both a mustache and a gut. His gun is holstered in his belt. He swings his arm wide around it, and in his hand dangles an oversize plastic mug with a bendable straw. He splashes it full of Cherry Pepsi and caps it and heads to the counter, whistling, the whistle cut short when Claire steps out from behind the greeting-card rack and says, “Excuse me?”
His feet drag to a stop. “What?” His mike squawks. His hand goes to it and he drops the volume as tinny voices chatter back and forth between blasts of static.
Red Moon Page 8