Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  He turns off the radio and she keeps singing another moment without it. In the silence that settles between them, he licks his lips, not sure what to say. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “We skipped school and now we’re driving around.”

  “You and Max. You’re together.”

  The tip of her cigarette burns as bright as a cherry. “He’s all right.”

  “If he finds out there’s something between us…”

  “Scared?”

  Something in the engine block whines. His odometer flips over to 145,000. “I don’t like trouble. I’ve had too much trouble.”

  The road angles and the sun flashes through the window and settles on her hair to create a blazing red halo. “I’m hungry.” She snaps on the radio again and says over the music, “Where are you taking me?”

  He shakes his head, not knowing whether to smile or kick her out the door. A few miles later, he pulls in to Hamburger Patties, where they order shakes and burgers, a basket of waffle fries, splats of mustard and ketchup in tiny paper cups.

  “You believe in Max?” he says. “The Americans and all that?”

  “And all that.” She shrugs and finishes off a bite of hamburger. “It’s something to do, people to be with.” She darts her tongue out and tastes her milk shake, her tongue lingering in it before curling upward, like a beckoning finger, back into her mouth.

  “Jesus,” he says. “You are pushing all kinds of buttons.”

  She wants to drive around. Someplace remote. He knows better but can’t stop himself. When she touches him on the shoulder or the hand, it’s like a jolt from a live wire. “I think I know a place,” he says.

  He glances at his handheld to study a map of the town he hasn’t yet memorized. The app boots up and displays his last entry, Battle River Drive. He hesitates—too long; he can feel her eyes on him—before thumbing save and then views a map of Old Mountain and orients himself.

  They trail a garbage truck on its way to the dump. A damp sheet of newspaper flutters out of it and splats onto his windshield, flattening there, the Sunday comics. Malerie screams with delight. The sun soaks through the paper and colors their bodies with squares of light. Patrick kicks on the wipers and the newspaper is gone and they are driving past the dump and hanging a left onto a chained-off driveway that leads to the abandoned lycan school. He takes the Jeep off road, to avoid the chained entry, and then chunks back onto the driveway, which opens into a weed-choked parking lot. Broken asphalt mutters beneath the tires.

  Malerie smears ChapStick across her lips and pops them. “You know Max is straight edge, right?”

  Patrick negotiates the Jeep through an old basketball court, the chain nets like rusted chandeliers, and then they are behind the school, out of view from the road. “He said kind of.”

  “Yeah, kind of.” She snorts more than says this. “No drugs, no smoke, no booze.” He parks the Jeep and kills the ignition. “He doesn’t even let me do this.” She unbuckles her seat belt. His eyes dart to meet hers just as she drops her head to his lap.

  There is a car coming toward him when he hits his blinker and gets ready to turn back onto the road—a Camry, as white as a polished bone. Behind the wheel he spots his mother. She has her cell phone pressed to her ear and doesn’t see him, he’s sure of it, distracted by her conversation.

  He hesitates a moment before ignoring his blinker, heading in the opposite direction, pulling onto the road behind her, following as she heads out of town.

  “What are you doing?” Malerie says.

  “I want to check on something.”

  His dashboard clock reads 88:88. Malerie hits it with the heel of her hand, then goes digging in her purse, withdrawing a hot pink Motorola Razr to check the time. “I need to get to work soon.” Three afternoons a week, she doles out pills at Walgreens as a pharmacy tech, and he agreed to drop her off.

  “This will only take a minute.”

  He keeps a hundred yards between her car and his. Another mile and his mother pulls off into the Juniper Creek development, as he guessed she would. He taps the brake and slows nearly to a stop.

  “What?” Malerie says.

  “Nothing.”

  Chapter 17

  MIRIAM CALLS HER WEAK. Her voice is not cruel so much as it is cold and precise. “You haven’t been sleeping enough. You haven’t been eating and exercising properly. You look scared of your own shadow.” If Claire is going to live with her—no, if Claire is going to live—she needs to toughen up.

  They begin the day with muscle building. They do wide-arm and narrow-grip push-ups on the living room floor. They do dips balanced between the coffee table and couch. Crunches and cherry pickers and leg lifts and lunges and planks. They hurl a medicine ball back and forth as if blasting it from a cannon. Miriam holds up her hands and Claire punches them, one-two, one-two, fast jabs, knuckles smacking palms.

  They make a grocery run and fill the cart. They drink protein shakes. They cook a half pound of bacon and scramble eggs in the grease coating the cast-iron pan. They eat beans, thick slices of cheese, summer sausage. Apples. Within five days Claire begins to fill out. She can’t see her ribs and she can feel the muscle and fat cording around her bones.

  And all this while, usually when they’re eating or stretching between workouts, Miriam tells Claire about her parents.

  They were part of a radical-line movement, what Miriam calls an underground conscience. This began in the sixties, when they enrolled at William Archer University and lycan political resistance was at its height.

  The information is readily available. A quick Google search of their names would have revealed a long string of articles, but it has never occurred to Claire to look. It has never occurred to her that her parents were anything other than NPR-listening armchair philosophers. They talked often about the Struggle, which peaked a few decades ago, but now she sees they were directly part of it—leading May Day demonstrations, joining labor unions, organizing boycotts—their aim to end segregation in schools, segregation in the workplace, segregation in restaurants and bathrooms and pools and hotels and retail stores, and the continued U.S. occupation of the Lupine Republic.

  They marched. They hurled rocks and eggs at police. They wrote letters to congressmen and shook signs from street corners. They staged full-moon frenzies in which they would transform en masse in a park or town square. They were arrested and posted bail and were arrested again. The Fourteenth Amendment passed with some concessions but not enough. Lycans could not work in education or medicine or law enforcement, could not serve in the military except in a designated frontline unit nicknamed the Dog Soldiers. Mandatory prescriptions and monthly blood tests remained in effect.

  Miriam says, “My brother’s principal stance, which I’m sure you’ve heard ten thousand times before, is that lycans are their own category of person. It is not a disease. It is an identity and way of life.” She explains that it was difficult to talk about this scientifically until the discovery of prions in the early eighties. The way the pathogen inhabits the body results in a symbiotic organism that is fundamentally part man and part wolf. “He was arguing for a new categorization of race, which most people aren’t willing to consider.”

  Then, Miriam says, then came the Days of Rage.

  * * *

  Neither Patrick nor his father is much of a talker, and ever since his unit was activated, on the two occasions they have Skyped, fidgety silence has defined their conversations. When they do speak, because of the slow connection, their words garble together so that they constantly say, “What? What was that?” On the computer, his father’s face appears pixilated and run through with lines of static. His mouth does not align with his words when he says, “Makes me sick thinking about what happened to you on that plane.”

  Email is better. They come every day, or every other, usually something small, like “What did u do today?” or “Love ya, bud.” His father tells him he should go for a drive, should go visit
Neal, and Patrick wants to say he has enough strangers in his life, but he doesn’t. His father complains about the snow that won’t quit, the wind that blackens skin, the MREs that taste like glue. The temperature dropped below zero the other night and a pipe burst on base and the water pressure coughed out for two days. Occasionally he writes about the war, telling Patrick about the rocket blast that woke him or how his platoon fought their way through an ambush as they humped five miles over steep, rugged terrain, sometimes thigh-deep in snow, only one man injured after getting blown off his feet by a land mine. Telling Patrick, too, that not everyone there is opposed to their presence. That most, in fact, seem pretty happy to see them patrolling the streets, guarding the mines. They work with local police. They meet with villagers, shake hands, share coffee and some godforsaken dish called lutefisk made from stockfish soaked in lye.

  Today Patrick’s handheld buzzes and he glances at the screen to find an email from his father, keithgamble1@gmail.com. The message reads, “Mountains. Forests. Lakes. This would be a beautiful place if not for all the fuckers who want to kill me.”

  Patrick nudges Max with his elbow, says take a look at this. They’re raking leaves and planting bulbs—tulips, irises, daffodils—outside the local women’s shelter. Max pulls off his dirt-smeared gloves and takes the phone and smiles and asks Patrick if he knows how lucky he is, having a father like that. “First thing I do when I hit eighteen,” Max says and flips his trowel in the air and catches it, a flash of sunlight on the metal. “I’m heading to that recruitment station, signing on to fight. I assume you feel the same?”

  In truth Patrick has been off and on researching colleges but can’t help but feel a twinge for Max’s approval. “Sure,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  * * *

  Claire has learned not to ask too many questions at once or Miriam will grow short or cagey or stop talking altogether. She has learned, in small doses, over the past few weeks, that since the 1960s her parents have been on a government watch list, that they have been jailed more times than Miriam can recall, that they eventually lost faith in violence as a strategy for anything but trouble and began, in the eighties, to put their energy into pacifism buttressed by action, organizing nonviolent campaigns that called attention to social injustice. “And then they gave up altogether.”

  “What happened?”

  “They had you.”

  Miriam says she can smell snow. “Any day now.” They are outside the cabin, in the scrub meadow that surrounds it, the sky as gray as concrete, the weeds browned and snapping underfoot. Miriam unrolls a Pendleton blanket and reveals a Glock, a .357, and a shotgun. Claire sets clips and bricks of ammo next to them.

  Miriam gives her a quick lesson on the Glock 17. Austrian-made semiautomatic pistol. Self-loading. Polymer frame. Checkered grip. Used by virtually every law enforcement agency. Outperforms any other handgun on the market for ease, accuracy, and durability. Seventeen-round double-stack magazines.

  Miriam shows Claire how to feed the magazine, how to disengage the safety, how to aim down the line of the barrel, the ramped front sight, the notched rear sight. “It’s got good bark, good bite, so be ready. You’re going to have to correct the muzzle rise after every shot.”

  Claire asks what she should aim for and Miriam points to the edge of the meadow, a pine tree, maybe ten years old, as tall as two men and as wide around as a leg.

  The pistol jumps in her hand like something alive when she squeezes off round after round. The gunshots slap through the trees and thunder in her ears so forcibly her hearing feels bruised. Brass casings spit like peanut shells. The smell of sulfur sharpens the air. Most of her shots miss the tree, but a few make it dance, knock pulpy white wads from the trunk.

  When she ejects the magazine and slams another into place, she thinks of her parents and the Days of Rage, the three days of demonstrations that took place at this same time of year, October 1969. “The Power Is in the Street” was the heading of the chapter Miriam showed her, apologetically calling the book leftist propaganda. The pages detailed how—during the late sixties and early seventies, at the height of the Struggle, as it came to be known—many lycans came to believe in direct action and violence as political strategy. Antigovernment graffiti appeared on buildings, statues were defaced, and leaflets were distributed at high schools and on college campuses. In Chicago, a bomb ripped apart a statue commemorating a policeman who died in the Haymarket Affair. In Milwaukee, a bomb exploded outside city hall and a passenger train was derailed by a slab of concrete set on the tracks; and in Lincoln, several mail trucks and police cars were set on fire. Thousands attended the demonstration in Chicago, where protesters turned over cars and smashed windows in homes and businesses and were beaten and fire-hosed and teargassed and dragged away by fascist police and National Guard members in full riot gear.

  And there was the black-and-white photo of her father, standing before the Chicago federal courthouse, fully transformed, his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in lamentation, standing on a stage before hundreds of people pumping their fists in the air. In his claw of a hand he clutched a burning American flag.

  It was beyond surreal, the equivalent of an adult looking up to see Santa and his reindeer track their way across a winter sky; terrifying, almost comical if not for the severe expression on Miriam’s face when Claire dropped the book to her lap and said, “This is hard to process.” The book was called The Revolution and its cover bore the image of a man casting a wolf’s shadow. She flipped it over to study the photo on its back cover. A curly-haired man glowered back at her. “Who wrote this anyway?”

  “Jeremy Saber. My husband,” Miriam said before departing the room and leaving Claire with a mouthful of unanswered questions.

  And now Miriam is correcting her stance, educating her in the design and temperament of each weapon, the .357 Smith & Wesson, the Browning pump-action. Another hour and her arm is trembling and her ears are throbbing. She levers the final smoking cartridge and when she lowers the shotgun, the pine tree seems to mimic her, groaning and splintering and slowly bowing until it rests on its side.

  “Wow,” Claire says. “I am such a badass now.”

  “Not really.”

  “Look at that tree! I destroyed it.”

  “A tree doesn’t move. A tree doesn’t fight back.”

  Claire rolls her eyes.

  Miriam studies her a moment, hardening her gaze; then—before Claire can register what is happening—her aunt crouches, snaps up a Glock, rolls forward, and blasts three pinecones off the branches of three different trees. Then she brings the pistol to her mouth and sucks the smoke rising from the muzzle and blows it in Claire’s face.

  Claire stands in stunned silence, then gives a hard swallow. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “React like that? Like you see something coming before anybody else can?”

  “How many times have you changed?”

  “Maybe ten.” Exactly nine.

  “In your life?” Miriam shows her teeth when she says this.

  “I don’t like how it feels.”

  “Claire.” She says the word like a curse. Her mouth quivers as though too full of words ready to come spilling out. But she doesn’t say anything more. She marches into the cabin and closes herself away in her room. Thirty minutes later, her door jars open and she grabs Claire by the forearm with enough force to leave a bruise and says, “You are going to learn.”

  * * *

  Patrick can’t get her out of his head, the girl from the other night. The girl he saved. He saved her. It feels good to think about her that way. After the whole world wanted to call him a hero—for doing nothing, for hiding while everyone on board the plane was ripped to pieces—he cherishes the possibility that he might be capable of something truly good, that the words written about him in articles and spoken to him by reporters might be genuine even if misplaced.

  Every time the thought or sight
of Malerie makes him feel wrong, his mind circles back to the girl for whom he did something unequivocally right. And every time his phone buzzes, he expects it to be her, her voice hesitant but warm. “I wanted to thank you again,” she would say, and he would ask her if she wanted to meet up and she would say yes and he would buy her coffee and they would sit by the sun-soaked window and when their feet touched beneath the table by accident they would smile and make eyes at each other through the steam rising from each of their cups brought simultaneously to their mouths for a taste.

  He is thinking about her now—even as Malerie stands before him in Max’s basement.

  She says it was easy. No trouble at all.

  She went to work like always—through the glass-doored entry, between the cash registers, past the photo department, to the office door that opened into a room lit with harsh fluorescent light. She punched her three-digit code into the clock and tossed her purse in her locker and changed into the shapeless dark blue scrubs she hates to wear. Lands’ End. The seams irritate her skin and the sizing is all jacked up so they don’t fit right. Anyway. She has three primary functions as a pharmacy tech—functions, that’s her boss’s language. She fills or she works the drop-off or pickup window.

  Filling is boring. She hates filling. She rips the patient leaflets off the printer, checks the promised times to make sure they’re in order, and fills, fills, fills, the pills clattering like hail into their containers, the containers then slipped into plastic totes, the totes dropped on a conveyor belt where the pharmacists can grab them and verify the product.

  Max tells her to get on with it, they don’t have all night.

  Tonight is Halloween and in the basement everyone is dressed in too-big cammies bought from the army surplus—all except for Malerie, who wears a devil costume, plastic horns and a red Lycra bodysuit from which a barbed tail dangles. She stands before them, her posture bent at the hip. In her hand, a small piece of lined notebook paper with handwriting crisscrossing it. Patrick sits crushed on the couch between Max and a hulking guy named Cash who smells like beef jerky.