There's Blood on the Moon Tonight

by Bryn Roar

  The crab traps weren’t more than six bucks apiece of wood, chicken wire and galvanized nails; but Ham, like his daddy before him, couldn’t bear to part with any of his hard-earned money. Neglecting to tie a safety line on, he dashed out on deck and grabbed the last two traps before they could skitter overboard.

  He was holding them up triumphantly for Rusty to see, when a large comber hit the boat broadside.

  Everything not tied down on deck, including Samuel J. Huggins, was washed overboard.

  Once again, Ham ended up comatose before he could witness Rusty O’Hara’s heroics. And once again, his stalwart friend refused to speak of it. This go-around Ham couldn’t picture the details of the improbable rescue.

  The last thing he recalled was hitting the water a half second before one of those traitorous traps conked him on the head. He awoke to find himself on the floor of the wheelhouse, while Joe Rusty, soaked to the bone, called in the Coast Guard. It turned out the air rescue had been unnecessary. But Joe Rusty, damn his freckled hide, had insisted on it anyway.

  They lifted Ham Huggins up to the helicopter in a body basket and flew him to the Beaufort Hospital. To this day, Ham had no idea how his friend pulled the rescue off.

  *******

  Ham Huggins dropped the newspaper, The Beaufort Gazette, on top of his empty plate and caught Rusty staring at him. “Somethin’ on your mind, son?”

  “I was just thinking about Mr. O’Hara.”

  Ham’s lined face grew pensive at the mention of his late friend. It had been almost eight years since Joe Rusty had fallen overboard. On that occasion there would be no heroics, even though Ham stayed out for ten straight days looking for him, going in only for gas and oil, the occasional sandwich and coffee. He’d kept his eyes pealed for that ridiculous floppy white hat Rusty always wore when working on deck, but it had disappeared, right along with its intrepid owner. He’d kept at it twice as long as the Coast Guard, and three times as long as common sense dictated (with the cool temps that week, hypothermia would have killed Joe Rusty within hours).

  Unlike those events when he’d fallen over the side, Ham never saw or heard Joe Rusty go overboard. Didn’t even have an inkling. His friend had simply vanished without a trace. It was his daddy all over again, and the guilt nearly killed Ham. That was a dark period in the Huggins’s household. Even worse for the O’Haras’ next door. In one fell swoop, they’d lost a husband, a provider, and a much beloved father.

  Rusty saw his dad rubbing the silver porpoise pendant around his neck. The very same one Joe Rusty had given him for his eighth birthday. He’d bought it special for Ham at a tourist trap called The Gay Dolphin in Myrtle Beach. His daddy always did that whenever he had Joe Rusty on his mind. Rubbed that grinning thing as if it would bring his best friend back…

  Rusty wondered if his dad was even aware of it.

  Ham smiled a bittersweet smile, recalling how damn silly Joe Rusty looked arriving at work each day. The man had this bright, curly red hair. Like doll’s hair, it was. Not to mention the palest skin Ham had ever seen on any fisherman! Rusty would slather on the strongest sun block he could find, painting himself even whiter than he already was. A man with skin like that, freckled from head to toe as he was, had no business making a living out in the cruel southern sun. Joe Rusty was a bit of a prude, too. A peculiarity for a man working in such a rough trade. Joe didn’t like to talk “vulgar”, as he used to put it. Had his own language for such matters. He referred to someone’s ass as a “teasy”, and a fart was a “fuus”. A man’s dick went by “hooey”, and a woman’s pussy was a “dewy”.

  And speaking of language, Joe Rusty had the most charming Irish brogue! A lilting way of talking that instantly put you at ease. He’d come by the accent honestly, from his “dear old mum and da”, as he called them. Passed it on to his daughter, too, before he died. The girl hanging on to her father’s every word back in those days.

  His folks had emigrated from Ireland when they were in their teens, living in Maine for a brief time, before finding their way down to Beaufort, where their son Joe was born in 1962. Like the Huggins’s, they’d only borne the one child. A fisherman by trade, Mr. O’Hara met Jessie Huggins on the Beaufort docks. A fortuitous meeting, that. For it was in that timeframe when Jessie Huggins first started renting property on his island.

  With their wee son, Joe, the same age as his Sam back home, Jessie had just the property in mind for the O’Haras’. Right next door to his. Now his boy would have someone his own age to play with! He just hoped Joe would someday learn to speak some American. He could barely make out what that Mr. O’Hara was saying!

  As it turned out, the passage of time didn’t make the O’Haras’ any easier to understand. Except for Joe Rusty—who, at his full height, six-feet-two-inches tall, would someday tower over his tiny parents—no one on the island could understand what the chirpy Irish couple was saying.

  No, not even Ham.

  Ham chuckled, remembering how he used to expect them to start dancing some kind of merry Irish jig. Like that cartoon leprechaun in the cereal commercial.

  Those were some sweet, sweet people, the O’Haras. Hard working, too! My Lord, they could work!

  Like Ham’s own dad, Mr. O’Hara worked himself into an early grave. No wonder then Joe Rusty grew to be the man he was—the finest friend I’ve ever known.

  “I sure do miss that red headed rascal,” Ham said, taking his lunch pail from his wife. “His tiny old mum and da, too.” He kissed Rusty’s forehead and patted Betty Anne on her pretty backside, as he headed out to work again. A little bit sadder than when he’d come in. After Joe Rusty, Ham didn’t take on any more partners. Just mates who worked for him; called him “Sir” on board, “Ham” on shore. That’s just the way Ham wanted it, too. That is, until his son was old enough to come on board full time.

  Rusty watched his dad leave through the back door, then turned to his mother. She was looking out the kitchen window, waiting for her husband to pass, her usually smooth brow wrinkled in concern. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Rusty said, pushing his chair back. “I didn’t mean to make Daddy sad. It’s just…I sometimes think about my namesake. The way Dad talks about him, makes the guy sound like a superhero or something.”

  Betty Anne looked down at her son. A smile had already returned to her face. “That Joe Rusty was something else, all right. Wasn’t for him, you and I’d be making do on our own. But don’t you worry about your father,” she said. Her voice was clipped and well educated. Betty Anne, unlike most of her peers, had gone on to high school in Beaufort. Along with poor Mrs. Brown, she had been instrumental in bringing a twelve-year school to the island. “Your daddy always gets droopy this time of year. The date of Joe Rusty’s passing is coming up, you know.”

  “I know,” Rusty said, looking in the direction of the O’Haras’. “I wonder…”

  “Wonder how your best friend is handling the memories? Buddy boy, too, for that matter.”

  Betty Anne bent over and kissed her startled son on each cheek. It was spooky the way mothers sometimes knew exactly what you were thinking.

  He grabbed his own considerable lunch bag from the table and his books beside it, making sure the DVD was on top. Then he slipped on his most prized possession: an old, green army field jacket with the nameGnat stitched defiantly over the right breast pocket.The Creeps over the left. As always, it made him feel two feet taller.

  He was already out the door when his mom called out to him from the kitchen window. “There’s not but one way to find out, sunshine! Ask them!”

  Rusty threw up a hand in reply as he rounded the backyard and the sandy bluff, which overlooked the crescent shaped beach below. A buoy dinged cheerfully a couple hundred yards past the shoreline of Crater Cove, where his granddaddy had washed ashore, oh, these many years ago. Further up the shore, breakers crashed explosively against the manmade rocky beach, marking the end of the East Side and the beginning of the North.

  To Rusty it was just
white noise.

  The distant horizon, curving ever so slightly, drew his eye, and not for the first time he marveled at the wonder of his own backyard. Rusty turned his back to the ocean and passed the little patch of ground his mother had literally built up from scratch for her vegetable garden. The ground this close to shore was nothing but sand and shells and hard red clay. Betty Anne had gone out in the woods by Lizard Lake to find suitable soil for planting. Then, with wheelbarrow and shovel in hand, she’d made countless trips, back and forth, until she’d had the necessary amount of earth to fill in the deep and wide hole she’d already dug out by the house. Even though Rusty loathed vegetables, he had to admire the end results. Tall stalks of corn rustled in the breeze as he walked by. They seemed to urgently whisper his name:Russsttyy! Russsttyy!

  His mother’s tomatoes were also coming in nicely, giving the bright green garden a vibrant splash of contrasting color. He passed into the front yard, which was encircled by a waist-high picket fence (waist high to his daddy, anyhow). A fence that was his responsibility to repaint four times a year. Once for every season of the year.

  The stiff, salty breeze blowing steadily off the ocean was murder on latex, and it seemed that he and his father were either repainting the cabin, the fence, or lighthouse on any given weekend. Work. Work. Work.

  He went through the gate and crossed over the tidy front lawn of the lighthouse to get to the O’Haras’ unkempt yard next door. The O’Hara cottage had once been a picturesque Cape Cod style bungalow. As pretty and well maintained as the Huggins’s log cabin across from it. Since Mr. O’Hara’s death it had fallen into a sad state of disrepair. His dad tried to help out, but Mrs. O’Hara refused any aid that didn’t come in the form of a welfare check. She wouldn’t take dime-one from Ham Huggins, anyway. Even if it meant her children had to do without.

  Which they most certainly did.

  The paint on the front porch was peeling badly. The flecks rustled in the wind like his mother’s corn. Rusty picked at it while he waited on Big Red to come out.

  Chapter Three:

  Josie “Big Red” O’Hara

  Josie O’Hara kicked off the sheets and stretched out on her twin-size bed like a lazy cat getting up from a nap; her long, tanned legs fully extended, her lithe toes stretching out like claws. Her hands and feet pointing at opposite walls in her narrow bedroom. Unlike most seventeen-year-old girls, whose pink bedroom walls are covered with pictures of the latest boy band or heartthrob du-jor, Josie’s sense of style was a bit more masculine. Her pale blue walls were strategically adorned with movie posters. And not just any movie posters, either. One-sheets from specific horror films, adapted, of course, from her favorite author’s books. She lingered in bed, admiring the posters, wishing she could afford to have them framed. For now plain old thumbtacks would have to suffice.

  It sucks being poor, she thought, slouching on the side of her bed. Yawning, she pulled the sleep-shirt over her head, pausing for a moment to sniff the old cotton T. The Billy Joel concert T-shirt had once belonged to her father (when she was nine it dropped down past her knees; now the frayed hem barely covered her teasy, as her daddy used to say), and after all these years and washings Josie swore she could still smell him in its tired old fibers.

  A comforting blend of sea salt, sun block, and Old Spice. A collage of scents, so specific to her daddy.

  She padded over to her private bathroom—a present her Uncle Ham had installed for her seventeenth birthday, last year—and closed the door behind her. Her little brother Joel was going through a bratty phase as of late, and like a Jack-in-the Box there was no telling when he might pop up.

  She examined her boobs in the mirror with a frustrated sense of panic. She scowled, stamping her foot on the tiled floor. “Occh! Stop growing, will ya! If the damn things get any bigger I’ll topple right the feck over!”

  Like tiny roses linked together on a floral chain, a light dusting of freckles bridged the upper slopes of her burgeoning breasts. Secretly, Josie thought her knockers very sexy. So did every hot-blooded boy on Moon. She hefted each breast in her hands to gauge their new mass. She still wasn’t used to the added weight. Lately her back had started to hurt. It mystified her how two lumps of flesh could be such boy magnets—yet there was no denying their power. Last year no one had given her a second glance; this term, the boys were practically tripping over their drooling tongues whenever she walked by—and for someone like Josie O’Hara, who placed the highest value on her personal space, the attention was a royal pain in the teasy.

  Safely behind closed doors, Josie felt secure enough to examine, even admire her own figure. She’d hit maturity late, and her body had grown from the scrawny scaffold of a tomboy, to that of a curvy woman almost overnight. Deep down she liked her new lush lines, but practically speaking her big tits had made her a social pariah. The few female friends she’d once had at the Academy had stopped speaking to her as soon as they noticed her new developments at the start of the recent school year. Some had even accused her of getting implants! Claiming that her new tits were as fake as her silly Irish accent, the catty lot having always believed Josie’s brogue was more affectation than authentic. When Josie told her mom of the accusations, Shayna had set her straight.

  “Honey doll, they’re just jealous of your jugs. Believe me, as soon as they grow a pair of their own they’ll forget all about it. And those that don’t, won’t, and by god never will! You may not know it yet, baby, but when used properly, those things can make men jump through hoops!”

  Her mother’s candor caused Josie to blush. Especially after her little brother, caught eavesdropping, ran out of the house, squealing an inscrutable declaration: “Josie’s got jugs! Josie’s got jugs! Hide your milk and cookies, cause Josie’s got jugs!”

  Josie knew Shayna was on to something, though. After all, she’d seen pictures of her mother as a teenager, and even back then Shayna had bigger knockers than Josie! And even though Shayna was the town “Otis” these days, drunk more often than not, she could still make men jump through hoops for the chance to see what was underneath her tight sweaters and clingy halter-tops.

  Joe wasn’t sweating the loss of her girlfriends, anyway. These days they only had boys and texting on their minds, subjects that bored Josie to tears. Besides, her best friends hadn’t deserted her—nor were they preoccupied with her current bra size. At least she didn’t think Bud and Rusty noticed that sort of thing. Although a part of her wouldn’t have minded it if Bud Brown started to look at her Thatway! Then again, she wouldn’t know what to do if Bud started drooling over her bod.

  Jaysus pleezus! That would be so feckin’ weird!

  She wished she could go back to the days when boys still looked her in the eyes—not like she was a pair of walking, talking tits. Especially that asshole, Lester Noonan, she thought, stepping into the shower. He made her skin crawl the way he looked at her.

  Like he had X-ray vision or something.

  After a hurried shower, Josie pulled back the curtain and squeeged the water from her hair with her hands. A plastic dart hit her smack in the forehead, where it stuck and quivered like some Indian Brave’s favorite arrow.

  She screamed, pulling the curtain over herself. Her little brother, eight-year-old Joel O’Hara, ran giggling from the room like an escaped lunatic.

  She yanked the suction cup from her forehead with a loud pop. “JOEL! YOU FECKIN’ BRAT! JUST YOU WAIT, BOYO! I’M GONNA CLOBBER YOU!”

  With visions of homicide in her head, she dressed quickly, slipping into a bra that was too tight and too lightly padded. It had seen better days and smaller boobs. Unfortunately it was the only one she had that came close to fitting her anymore. The rest were just taking up space in her undies drawer. She couldn’t borrow one of her mom’s. Shayna was touchy about that sort of thing. As always, Josie chose to wear her only pair of khakis and a blue polo shirt, the school’s pink crest straining over her left tit.

  She left the shirt un-tucked, even
though that was a violation of the school’s dress code. Like her bra, her khakis had seen better days (her bust wasn’t the only body part expanding). The threadbare fabric, literally bursting at the seams, was holding on with a hope and a prayer. When it was necessary to bend over, Josie did so very carefully. Still, the pants were better than the alternative, the short uniform skirt, shoved all the way into the corner of her closet, where all the other useless clothing items resided.