Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  “Why not?”

  “It implies a lack of strength.”

  “Then what the hell am I supposed to call you?”

  “My name.”

  “Out of the question.”

  He settled on Buffalo. For the enormous head, too big for any hat, that seems to grow directly out of his sloped shoulders. Chase nicknames everyone he meets. His administrative assistant, Moneypenny. His legal counsel, No Fun. The head of his security detail, Shrek, for his bald head, his jutting forehead, his barrel of a torso balanced on tiny legs. Even the people he doesn’t know, he finds a way to name them—a bartender is honey or sugar, a valet or groundskeeper is buddy or friend. It’s his way of making people come a little closer, look him in the eye and smile.

  Sweetheart is what he calls the woman working the front desk at the Kazumi Day Spa. He recognizes her from the teahouse. The wrinkled face and square body and silvery hair pulled back into a bun stabbed through with chopsticks. A potted bamboo sits in the corner. A scroll bearing a string of Japanese characters hangs behind her. She doesn’t smile at him but lifts her arm, gesturing to a dark hallway, and says, with a heavy accent, “Last door on the left.”

  The spa is in southwest Salem—not too far from the teahouse—a nondescript windowless brick building tucked between a pawnshop and a moneylender, the street busy with rusted-out cars missing their mufflers.

  In a back room, the recessed lighting gives off a dim orange glow. Music trembles—piped in through the overhead speakers—something acoustic, what Chase recognizes as the same instrument played at the teahouse, the koto, the plucked strings making him think of spiders’ legs dancing across a web. In the center of the room waits the massage table and against the wall squats a glass-doored, marbled-topped bureau, full of white downy towels, bottles of oil and lotion. On top of it, a plug-in fountain, water gurgling over colored stones.

  Buffalo used to tell him not to come here. For a long time, his principal duty, as chief of staff, seemed to be telling Chase what not to do. Do not bad-mouth Weyerhaeuser. Do not make fun of the Trail Blazers. Do not curse during live press conferences. Do not get intoxicated at black-tie fund-raisers. Do not punch Ron Wyden. Do not tell the Oregonian that you think Nancy Pelosi is one smoking-hot old lady.

  The attacks changed everything. “You realize,” Buffalo said, more than a month ago, when the planes came down, “that this is the best thing that could have possibly happened?” At the time they were at Mahonia Hall, the governor’s mansion, a place Chase never liked much. The pretention of it—Tudor-style, ballroom, wine cellar, surrounded by thorny rose gardens. Not to mention that ten thousand square feet can feel pretty lonely in the middle of the night, when the dreams come to him. Sometimes he wakes up gasping—believing he is still in the Republic, where he served two tours—his nose choked with the smell of cooking flesh, his eyes imagining clawed hands scrabbling out from beneath the bed like a pair of gray spiders. He has more than once brought the security guard a beer to split on the front steps at three a.m.

  The afternoon of the attacks, he and Buffalo were sitting in wingback oxblood leather chairs, watching the flat-screen, flipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News. Same footage, different talking heads. Outside Denver, the wreckage smoldered in a wheat field. At PDX and Logan International, the planes were parked on the tarmac like giant white coffins.

  A reporter interviewed a woman wearing a Looney Tunes sweatshirt and purple leggings. The tape at the bottom of the screen identified her as a family member of one of the passengers. “It’s the most horrible thing in the world,” she said, roughing away her tears with the remains of a tissue. “And it’s happening right here.”

  The footage cut to Jeremy Saber, the leader of the Resistance movement, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. In a video he posted online, he sat at a desk in a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was a mess of curls—his face square and shadowed with whiskers—and his arms were sheathed with tattoos. He looked more like a barista or hip college instructor than the spokesperson for an extremist group. “Some will say we do not value human life. We value it very much. That is why we have taken it away. We do it with remorseful intention. You are paying attention now. That is what we need for you to do. Pay attention. Our demands have not been met.” He went on to list enforced medication and blood testing, limited employment opportunities, the U.S. occupation of the Republic, and the proposed construction of a public lycan database as chief among his complaints. “If the government does not respond to these very reasonable requests, we will be forced to be unreasonable again. The terror will continue.”

  Buffalo stood then and tucked his hands in the pockets of his sport coat and walked over to the window, the gray light coming through the water-spotted glass reminding Chase of his Marine Corps woodland-pattern cammies.

  “One way of looking at it is this,” Buffalo said. “As a tragedy.” He turned to Chase and removed a hand from his pocket and pointed it like a gun. “Here is another. It is a game changer. It is timely. It is advantageous. You are the only politician in the country who has fought in the Republic. We need to remind people of that.” He has a way of talking, carefully enunciating each word as if it were a tiny gem delivered between his teeth.

  He worked as a lawyer for ten years before joining a management consulting firm that told businesses what machines to buy, which people to fire and locations to close. He developed strategic marketing platforms to boost or reinvent a corporation, making a WorldCom into an MCI, he liked to say. He was the one who approached Chase about running for governor. And now, for the first time—Chase can see it in his trembling mouth—Buffalo seems to believe in the possibility of reelection. “We need to get you behind a microphone by this evening, ideally with that plane in the background.”

  “We’ll bang out a speech on the drive up?”

  He considers this a moment. “No. Speak from the heart. Just make sure your heart is more furious than mournful.” On the television, another shot of the flaming wreckage. Buffalo’s glasses catch the shimmering orange light and the lenses glow like twin suns. “People are ready for fury.”

  Fury is what Chase gave them, two hours later, outside the open hangar that now housed the plane, rain wetting his face, a crowd of reporters gathered around him. “What do I think?” he said to them. “I think it’s time to tighten the leash, roll up a newspaper, say bad dog.”

  Since then he has spoken to every major news network, every magazine and newspaper, made a villain and a hero. He has earned, for the first time, his own nicknames. Dog Soldier is one. The Game Warden another. He sees his face when he logs on to AOL, when he opens Newsweek to read the editorial comics, when he flips the channels on the flat-screen with a cold Coors resting against his crotch. He supports a continued occupation of the Republic and a greater reliance on nuclear energy and quotes polls that indicate that the Republic by and large feels the same, its citizens dependent on the jobs and infrastructure and security the U.S. supplies. He supports the public registry—a watchdog list, he calls it. He supports vaccine research, segregation, suspended rights. “Extremism in the face of extremism,” he calls it.

  All this talking exhausts him. He keeps a handful of lozenges in his pocket and finds an antidote to all the noise on the treadmill—pounding out five miles every evening, sweating through his clothes—and in sex. Sometimes he seduces women—the blond reporter at KOIN 6, the redheaded waitress at the Book of Kells Irish pub—and sometimes he pays for them.

  Today he pays. At the day spa, in the back room, a digital thermostat on the wall reveals the temperature to be seventy-five degrees, warm enough to make him eager to kick off his boots, peel off his clothes, pile them in a heap in the corner. Jeans and a denim shirt. Corduroy jacket. Belt with a Buck knife holstered to it. Silver six-inch blade, a birthday present from his father when he turned sixteen. He carried it in the Republic and doesn’t go anywhere without it now. He retired as a colonel, and across his
naked shoulder, like a bruise, he carries the faded ink of the anchor-and-eagle tattoo.

  He palms a condom from his pocket. A white towel hangs from a hook. He ties it around his middle. The light is such that his shadow hardly seems to exist, oozing faintly across the floor and then the massage table. He climbs up and settles his face into the cushioned groove.

  He hears the knob rattle, the door click closed, the footsteps whisper across the carpet. Her name is Choko. They visit for an hour every few weeks. Sometimes he lets her dampen his back with oil, rub the poison out of his muscles—and sometimes he does not. Sometimes he asks her to flip him over. Sometimes she takes him in her mouth or her hand. And sometimes she climbs onto the table with him.

  “Hey, you,” he says and raises his head to peer at the woman standing a few feet away. She wears a red kimono with a black dragon stitched into it. Hair down to her elbows. She smiles. The fountain gurgles. He lets his head drop into the groove again. “Give me a little rub, will you? I’m knotted up. Then we can get busy.”

  He feels a hungry anticipation. The blood pools in his center. His erection presses uncomfortably against the table. He hears her clothes drop. He hears her breathing heavily, almost panting.

  “Hey, what kind of a party’s going on without me?” He is smiling when he rises on his elbow. The pressure of the table has made his vision muddy. At first he believes this is why her nude form seems to shift, to bulge and bend, like a reflection seen on the body of a passing car. And then he blinks hard and observes between blinks the contorted posture, the lengthening teeth, the black hair bristling like quills from her skin. He feels a hole in his stomach like he used to get when small-arms fire popped in the near distance, when tracer rounds streaked through the night like blood-red comets.

  Her voice is guttural when she says, “I have a message from the Resistance.”

  Before he can slide off the table, she has his leg—snatching it up—her claws and then her teeth sinking into his calf. He kicks at her and she falls with a mouth full of blood. His blood. He doesn’t take the time to examine the wound, to recognize what this means, infection.

  The towel slips off him when he falls off the table. His first impulse is to stupidly grab for it, cover himself—and then, equally stupid, to race for the door, call for help. But he realizes midshout that this was a planned attack and plans are rarely made alone.

  She growls. It is a bestial sound. He can feel it. Feel it in his bones like when bass pours from a too-loud stereo. He has never been more vulnerable, naked and unarmed, bleeding. He doesn’t feel any pain, not yet. Only the warmth of blood running along his leg, its tackiness underfoot when he stumbles back, looking for a weapon, something to swing.

  The bureau jars against his spine, preventing any further retreat. The mist from the fountain licks his back. He yanks its cord from the outlet and scoops it up and hurls it at the lycan. Its stones are like a brightly colored hail rattling the floor. The bowl arcs toward her, and she puts out her arms to catch it and it thuds against her chest and the water dampens her hair and makes it appear a rippling shadow.

  She is on one side of the massage table—the padding torn through in yellow slashes—and he is on the other. He needs to get to the pile of clothes, the knife nested in it, on the opposite side of the room. He can smell her. He would recognize that smell anywhere, the smell of a lycan. Like an unwashed crotch. Supposedly set off by their hyperstimulated pituitary gland.

  Her posture is hunched and her breasts dangle pendulously and her arms rake the air and her face is nearly impossible to decipher beneath all that hair. She makes a noise that sounds like a guttural string of words. His skin goes tight. She begins to climb over the table, toward him, one arm and then the other. He tries to run and nearly topples, his feet sliding across the stones.

  He is to the clothes when she leaps and knocks him to the floor. For a moment they might be lovers, a tangle of limbs, breathing heavily. She is faster than him, but he is stronger. He loops an arm around her throat and drags them back against the wall. Her body bucks against his but he holds her in place. She wears his arm like a necklace. He is choking her and she claws at him, tearing away ribbons of skin from his forearm, his thighs, his ribs, wherever she can reach, while he sets his jaw against the pain and uses his free arm to seek out the knife, yanking his belt from the pile of clothes, fumbling with the leather casing.

  Finally he withdraws it and unfolds the blade. In its silvery flash he catches a glimpse of his eyes, wide with fright. Then he draws the knife toward them in an arc. The woman—no, the lycan, the thing—tries to block the blade, swatting and tearing at him, but her strength is fading and after a few wild swings he sneaks the knife to her chest, where it catches against a rib—and grinds its way inside her.

  What would have been a growl, against the pressure of his chokehold, escapes as a plaintive mewl. He stabs her again and again, so many times—knife, knife, knife—far more than necessary, her body limp in his lap. She doesn’t reassume her human form. Not like in the fairy tales. She dies a beast and a beast she remains.

  He feels faint. The room seems so cold and her body so warm. He could fall asleep with her draped over him like this. But he doesn’t. He shoves her aside and stands with great difficulty and fights the gray wings beating at the edge of his vision. He tries not to look at his ruined arm when he retrieves the towel from the floor and makes a tourniquet of it. Roses of blood bloom immediately through the cotton.

  There are no windows. There is only one way out. And only one way in. It takes him a while, but he drags the bureau against the door. He remembers how severely the old woman stared at him, and he knows Choko did not act alone. He needs help. His hand is trembling and slick with blood, but somehow he manages to retrieve the handheld from his jacket pocket and call Buffalo, telling him what happened, telling him to hurry.

  Chapter 12

  PATRICK SPENDS several days planning his escape—figuring out which stairs creak, spritzing the door hinges with WD-40, backing his Jeep into his parking spot and testing how easily it rolls in neutral—and then his mother tells him she’s going out of town. The National Association of Realtors. They’re having a conference in Portland this weekend.

  He is so thrilled he doesn’t sigh or roll his eyes when she asks him to join her this afternoon to freshen up a house. “It will be fun,” she says. He is lying on the couch, reading the newspaper, some article about the ongoing investigation into the death of a local rancher and city council member. The ground around the corpse was a mess of coyote tracks, but the game warden claims it was highly unusual and even beyond reason to believe coyotes capable of such behavior.

  The couch is leather. So is the matching armchair next to it. The living room looks like something out of a Pottery Barn catalogue. Wool carpet. Wrought-iron lamps. Dark-wooded end tables. His mother does all right.

  She finishes clipping on an earring and then roughs her hair with a pick. A silver stripe flares at her left temple and curls all the way to the base of her neck, through hair that is otherwise thick and black. She hides her age well, the wrinkles fanning from her eyes caked with a layer of foundation. “So you’ll come?” she says.

  “I guess.”

  Her cheeks dimple when she smiles. Like his. These past few weeks, he’s spent a lot of time studying her, trying to figure out how they match up. He’s a lot like his father—that’s what people say—same hawkish nose and high forehead, same square-tipped fingers and huge hands dangling from thin wrists like shovel heads. But he belongs to them both.

  She pokes him with the pick on her way out of the living room—gives his cheek a little bite with it—and he swats it away with a “Quit.”

  She’s trying—he’ll give her that—trying to make him feel welcome. And he tries to reciprocate, to make himself available, answering her incessant questions, sitting at the kitchen table to do his homework, joining her when she watches the stupid television show about the horny doctors.

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sp; He’s not looking for drama. His life needs the volume turned down, not up. He knows a lot of crybabies in his situation would probably lock themselves in their rooms and eventually throw a damp-eyed fit about how Mommy abandoned them. Whenever he feels tense and ready to shatter a dish against the wall, he remembers his father, who demanded he not feel sorry for himself.

  Still, there are little things that bother him. The way she uses her hands when she speaks, pointing and pinching and swinging and flapping. The way she’s always losing lids—the milk, the mustard, the oatmeal—everything in the house uncapped. The way she programs the thermostat. All of August she kept the air-​conditioning at seventy-four—and now that the weather has turned cold she keeps the heat at sixty-seven. “Jesus,” he says. “Wouldn’t it make sense to negotiate between the seasons, keep it at seventy year-round?”

  And she’s a bit of a freak when it comes to messes. She’ll pull a shirt right off him if it’s wrinkled. She’ll scoop up a dish the moment he drops it on the counter and rinse it off to set in the dishwasher. And he could tell, when she put down the money on the used Jeep, how disgusted she was by it. “Are you sure?” she said, too many times, pointing out the other cars in the lot, all of them sedans, only going along with his insistence on the run-down Wrangler because she would do anything right then to make him happy.

  She drives a white Camry so clean the sky streams across its hood like water. The interior still smells new, despite the car being a few years old, so different from his father’s pickup, with the dust coughing from the vents and the French fries moldering under the seats. Before they left, she grabbed a vented carrier from the garage and set it in the backseat. Inside sits a calico cat that paws and bites at the caged door and hisses when Patrick turns around. “What’s with the cat?” he says, and his mother says, “It’s for a friend. They were giving them away at the gas station.”