Dark Side of the Moon

by Dia Reeves

  “Still zero for bravery, but full marks for passion and your newly developed social conscience. So seventy.” It really wouldn’t do for Chickie to become conceited.

  He removed his letter sweater and helped her into it.

  “Finally!” Sue Jean squealed, rolling up the sleeves and luxuriating in the rich red warmth of his love. “Now that we’re going steady, I’ll award you an extra five points.”

  “Five points? Is that all my love is worth?” Chickie kissed her again, and this time, everything turned to jelly. “Now what’s the score?”

  Sue Jean against the hood, smiling. “One million.” So what if he developed a big head; he deserved it. “The earth moved. Did you feel it?”

  “Yeah.” He straightened up from the hood and looked around. “But that was because a couple more buildings just collapsed. I mean, it wasn’t me.” He pulled Sue Jean to her feet and opened the car door for her.

  “That’s why you’re squeamish about upsetting the natural order, isn’t it?” she said. “I talk so lightly about changing the world, but you really could, Chickie Hill. You really could save or destroy the world.”

  “Sure I could,” he said matter-of-factly as he got in the car and cranked the radio. “Speedo” was playing; he loved that song. “And so could you. So could anyone.” Chickie laughed. “But screw it, mama. Let’s just see where the road takes us.”

  Sue Jean settled back, caught in his orbit, not upset about the past or worried about the future. Content, for once, to simply enjoy the ride.

  The Dark Side of the Moon

  When Cado snuck up on Patricia in her backyard, her first reaction was not to scream but to thwack him over the head with a silver watering can.

  And that was what he loved about her.

  “Oh my God, Cado!” She dropped the watering can and tried to break his fall as he wilted into the petunias. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Not as sorry as me,” said Cado, rubbing his head.

  After she’d checked to her satisfaction that she hadn’t cracked his skull into a million pieces, Patricia threw herself into Cado’s arms and rolled him around in the flowers like she thought she was a milkmaid. “You’re not even supposed to be here until tomorrow!”

  “I know, but I wanted to sleep over, and I figured your folks wouldn’t’ve agreed if I had asked first.”

  “That’s amazingly diabolical.” Patricia’s kiss was like a stamp of approval. “My influence is finally rubbing off on you.”

  But she didn’t ask why he’d come early, probably assuming he wanted to catch her in the shower or something predictable like that. Patricia knew a lot, like what all the initials in The Wall Street Journal stood for and how to apply lipstick so that it never smeared no matter how hard Cado kissed her. But she didn’t know him. Not as well as she thought she did.

  He sat up and rescued the bouquet of daylilies from where he’d dropped them after getting clobbered. The petals matched the setting sun and blazed against the black of Patricia’s dress as he presented them to her. “I brought this for you.”

  “Why?” Patricia asked, hip deep in flowers, yet staring at the daylilies as if they were alien babies.

  “Because you like flowers. Duh.”

  “Not as a symbol of love. Those are going to wither and die in a week. Is that what you think about our relationship? That it’s going to wither and die in a week?”

  “No,” he said after realizing the question wasn’t rhetorical.

  Patricia grabbed the bouquet that he had painstakingly selected and threw it so hard it sailed over the wrought iron fence and smacked a passing businessman in the face.

  Patricia didn’t understand him, but sometimes Cado didn’t understand her either.

  After she helped him to his feet, he grabbed his duffle bag and flute case from the petunias and followed her through the back door into her home.

  “Want a cool drink?”

  “Maybe later,” he said, distracted by her outfit, a black dress with no back and shoes that exposed her manicured toes—definitely not a milkmaid. She smelled cold and Parisian. “You look nice.”

  Patricia twirled for him, showering the floor with pink petunia petals. “My folks are taking me to dinner at Gitano’s before you steal me away. Wanna come?”

  They hadn’t seen each other since he’d gone to Castelaine to see her perform two months ago. They almost never saw each other except at recitals and band camps, like the one they were driving to tomorrow. Although they talked and texted all the time, the whole long-distance thing was beyond suck. “I’d rather stay here with you.”

  “They’ll be home any minute,” Patricia insisted, and before he could stop her, she popped the zit on his chin. She was always doing that to him. “I don’t care if it scars you,” she’d say whenever he complained. “I’d rather look at scars than pus.”

  “We only have enough time to change you into something less transy,” she said, dabbing his chin with a kitchen towel.

  Cado held her away and looked down at himself, his worn jeans and new blue Fourth of July T-shirt. “Transy?”

  “It’s short for transient.” She put her hand over her mouth briefly, as though she had been impolite. “It doesn’t mean anything bad; it’s just what we call people who obviously aren’t from Portero. Usually Porterenes wear black in public.”

  “How can y’all stand it? Especially in the summer.” It had to be close to one hundred degrees outside.

  “We’re used to it, though it helps not having anything to compare it to.” She led him upstairs and into her room. “I mean, it’s not exactly a law, but it may as well be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people die all the time here,” she said solemnly, taking his duffle bag and setting it on her bed. “Death surrounds us. Did you pack a suit?”

  “Um...” He was inclined to take Patricia seriously when she spoke of death and monsters, now more than ever after what he had seen last month, but still, her mix of weirdness and practicality always mystified him.

  “I have a black shirt and pants.”

  She rummaged through his poorly packed bag, but after finding the shirt and pants, the search continued. “Where’re your ties?”

  “Ties? I thought we were going to dinner, not Buckingham Palace.”

  “You can take the boy out of the country,” she muttered, giving him a pitying look. “I’ll get something of my dad’s.”

  Cado changed clothes while she was gone, noting the real art on the walls, the violin from Austria gleaming in an open case on her desk, the blue silk covering her bed and pillows, and the fresh yellow daylilies ironically scenting the air. He tried his best not to smudge anything.

  Patricia returned and gave him her dad’s jacket and tie, which he struggled into while she dumped the contents of a red purse into a metal one that reminded him of an anorexic version of his mom’s toaster.

  Cado examined himself in Patricia’s full-length mirror. The jacket fit tight on his arms; if he flexed he would burst the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

  “I look like a gorilla at the opera.”

  “You do not! Don’t be so down on yourself. You’re handsome and smart”—Patricia jabbed him with the metal purse after each point—“and a soon-to-be world famous flutist.”

  “I guess. You smeared lipstick on your purse.”

  “That’s not lipstick,” she said and then applied some to her mouth, as if he had reminded her. “That’s blood. And what do you mean, ‘you guess?’”

  “Are you bleeding?” He grabbed her hand and she wound up with lipstick on her chin.

  “That’s not my blood, silly.” She swatted him away and fixed her face while he examined the purse. “It’s not even fresh; it just looks like it is.”

  And it did, dripping across one side of the metal like an open wound but not staining his hands.

  “A couple years ago, there was a plague of blood grackles,” Patricia explained through lips that matched the stain o
n her purse. “They looked just like regular grackles except blood grackles liked to eat people instead of worms. Fortunately they couldn’t abide metal, so for a while, it was all the thing to wear metal accessories as protection. Mama bought me that purse for my birthday, and wouldn’t you know that very same night, I had to bash a couple of blood grackles out of the air when they dive-bombed me. On my birthday of all days!”

  She finished doing her makeup and fluffed out the curly afro puff resting cloudlike atop her head, not even interested in his reaction to her story.

  No one back home would have believed her, but Cado did. Patricia wasn’t the type to bullshit anyone or mince words. “Are they still around?” he asked. “Those blood grackles?”

  “They got wiped out last year. All the metal was too much for them.” She nodded at the purse in his hands. “That stain is all that’s left, as far as I know.” Patricia unknotted the mess he’d made of her father’s tie and redid it. “Some of the faculty from The Shepherd School are gonna be at the retreat.”

  Patricia’s ability to flit nimbly from the bizarre to the mundane floored him yet again. “The Shepherd School at Rice? Why do you care? I thought you wanted to go to Oberlin?”

  “Rice is closer. And cheaper.” She smoothed her hand over his now perfect tie. “Cheap enough even for gorillas who play the flute.”

  “It’d be better for my family if I went to A&M and studied farming or—”

  “The hell with your family! Just man up and make a decision, Cado, and don’t hide behind your family.”

  Definitely didn’t mince words.

  “That’s why I came early,” Cado told her. “To man up.”

  The car horn startled them both. Patricia peeped through the window blinds; the dying sunlight clawed her face.

  “It’s my folks.” She took her purse from him and tucked it under her arm. “This conversation isn’t over.”

  Cado didn’t like when she got upset with him, but he didn’t mind it—Patricia was cute when she got her back up. He grabbed her hand and held it all the way down the stairs. “Do you have any other magic weapons like that purse?”

  “There’s no such thing as magic. Otherwise I’d send a wise old elf to tell you to apply to Rice so that we can finally be together. Not a day here or two weeks there, but really together. For as long as we want.”

  “I might not get in. It’s not a sure thing.”

  “You were on From the Top, for God’s sake. You know how many classical musicians would kill to be on that show? Rice would slit its wrists to have you enroll.”

  “But it’s so…high art. You know? Tuxedos and tea sandwiches.” His hand sweated all over hers just thinking about it. “That’s your world, not mine.”

  She didn’t give Cado a pitying look this time; she looked into him, there on the bottom step, and she liked what she saw. “You’re awesome enough to make it in any world.”

  And because it was Patricia who’d said it, he believed her.

  ✽✽✽

  Cado wanted to stick a fork in his eye, but there were four to choose from, and the Markhams would sneer if he chose wrong.

  “A salad fork?” they’d say. “In the eye? Everyone knows salad forks go in the ear.”

  At least Patricia’s folks were devoted. Not just proud of their daughter but pleased with her. Cado, on the other hand, they seemed to find thoroughly and mouth-twistingly unpleasant.

  “So,” said Mr. Markham heavily, as Cado toyed with the overabundance of heirloom cutlery. “Why the flute? Were the ballet classes all filled that day?”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Daddy.” Patricia rested her foot atop Cado’s and sipped from her wine glass. Red wine that looked like blood and tasted like Mardi Gras.

  “I don’t mind,” Cado told her. “I get it worse at home. You’d be surprised at the numerous and creative ways my dad finds to impugn my manhood.”

  His vocabulary impressed the Markhams against their will. Those soulnumbing SAT drills had been good for something at least.

  “Have you been to Portero before?” Mrs. Markham asked, her polite tone at odds with her stony expression.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Markham touched her daughter’s hand. “Be sure to show him the sights, darling: the Old Mission, Fountain Square. The historic district is always nice.” She gave Cado a tight smile. “You can look at the pretty houses.”

  Cado sipped from his own wine, resisting the urge to stick his pinkie out. “That sounds like fun, ma’am.”

  “Does it?” Mr. Markham said. “Would you also like to go antiquing with my grandmother this Saturday?”

  “Maybe. Is your granny as cute as Patricia?”

  Patricia laughed and clinked her glass against Cado’s. “Excellent riposte, sir. But no one is as cute as me.”

  Cado was saved from Mr. Markham’s retort by the arrival of their waiter. While Mr. Markham ordered for everyone, Patricia and Cado began texting each other.

  Patricia: You’re the cute one.

  Cado: Not for much longer. Your dad hates my guts.

  Patricia: Sure does.

  Cado: Why? Cuz I haz white skin?

  Patricia: No. Cuz you haz white penis.

  “I wish the two of you would stop that,” Mrs. Markham said as the table shook with the force of their laughter. “That’s incredibly impolite.”

  “It is not,” said Patricia, even as she put her phone away. “We’re multitasking.” She kissed Mrs. Markham’s cheek. “Don’t be so twentieth-century, Mama.”

  Cado considered taking some of the bread that had been left with them—and that had been architecturally arranged with more thought than the Sydney Opera House—but lost his nerve at the last minute.

  “Which college are you going to?” Mr. Markham asked him.

  “Um...”

  Patricia said, “He’s trying to decide between Rice and A&M.”

  “It just depends on how things work out,” Cado added when Mr. Markham kept staring at him.

  “With the Young Artists’ retreat or with my daughter?”

  “Neither. It all depends on the night trolley.”

  The Spanish guitarist seemed deafening in the intense silence that followed Cado’s statement.

  “What do you know about the”—Patricia lowered her voice—“night trolley?”

  “About a month ago I was on a hunting trip with my uncles. We thought we were about to flush a wild hog from the bushes, but it wasn’t a hog.

  “At first I thought it was a naked man running wild in the woods, a maniac or something. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t a man. It wasn’t human. It had sick white skin and needle sharp teeth and a head three times as big as mine.”

  Patricia said, “Big as a pumpkin?”

  “Yeah!” The recognition on their faces healed something in Cado he hadn’t known was damaged. His family had half-convinced him he’d been seeing things. Even his uncles who had seen the same thing he had.

  “A cackler?” Mrs. Markham said to her husband. “In Charter? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “They get out, but they don’t last long.” Mr. Markham turned a sour eye on Cado. “Certain people aren’t as tolerant as we are.”

  “That wasn’t any sort of thing I was ready to tolerate,” Cado said. “It was already dying when we flushed it out, but it was more than ready to take us all with it. I got in behind it with my hunting knife and put it down.

  “My uncles buried it and said not to tell anybody. That even though it was a crazy mutant we could all end up in jail.”

  “A mutant?” the Markhams exclaimed.

  “Uncle Beau said that was the only logical explanation.”

  “That a man was bitten by a radioactive pumpkin and became a mutant?” said Mr. Markham. “That kind of logic?”

  Patricia said, “What does any of that have to do with the night trolley?”

  “Uncle Beau said that it came from here. That Portero was full of mutants. And he to
ld this story about a friend of his who moved here. The locals started in on him, telling him he should move back where he came from, that he didn’t have what it took to live in their town. So Uncle Beau’s friend asked what was the bravest thing anybody could do. And they all said the same thing: ride the night trolley.

  “They said it was a kind of ghost on wheels that only came in the dead of night, and people who rode it were never seen again. They told him that if he could survive a ride on the night trolley, every Porterene would worship him as the most hardcore badass in all creation. So Uncle Beau’s friend agreed.

  “They sat with him at the stop til three a.m. and after the trolley appeared out of thin air, they watched him climb aboard. They waited all night for him to come back, but he never did.

  “You Porterenes have your cacklers and your blood grackles and no fear of anything. Except this one thing. That’s the reason I came early, to do what Uncle Beau’s friend couldn’t—ride the night trolley and live to tell the tale. If I can be brave enough to do that, to experience something that even a Porterene thinks is scary, I can be brave enough to do anything. Even become a classical musician.”

  At the end of Cado’s long, heartfelt recitation, Patricia and her parents laughed. They laughed until they couldn’t breathe.

  But Cado was a redneck who played the flute. People would probably still be laughing at him at his own funeral.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After dinner, Cado and Patricia escaped her parents and went to Fountain Square to watch the fireworks with her friends who were all band geeks and, like Cado, played uncool instruments: the oboe, the xylophone, the piccolo. Everyone wore black, just as Patricia had claimed, but they also managed to show their patriotism with Fourth of July buttons and hats. Several people had painted the American flag on their faces.

  As they sat together in an amphitheater—with a huge fountain at its center spouting red, white, and blue water—Cado noticed that the Porterenes shared an odd resemblance; but not like relations, nothing that simple. More like they had once all been held hostage together and still bore the psychic scars.