Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  Deacon leaves the coffee shop five or ten minutes after the detective and stands on the sidewalk outside for a while, smoking a cigarette and gazing vacantly at the marquee of the Alabama Theater directly across the street. Grand old movie palace saved from the wrecking ball, and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA in ruby-red plastic letters, LON CHANEY OCTOBER 27; he exhales a gray cloud of smoke, and the breeze along Third Avenue picks it apart. Only five blocks home, but what then? Chance away in Atlanta today on business and their big, empty loft waiting there for him, full of nothing at all but television and his aching head, time alone he doesn’t need and the desert in his throat. He reaches into his coat pocket, and there’s the cop’s white calling card, and another card, too, the one with the phone number printed on the back, the number he never goes anywhere without, the number to call if the thirst ever gets the upper hand again. Today it just might do that, he thinks and allows himself the hazardous indulgence of imagining endless liquor-store aisles, pint bottles filled with gin and rum and Jack Daniel’s whiskey, alcohol fire to soothe the pain behind his eyes, to burn away the memories of Soda’s mutilated body and the thing he saw looking back at him from the mirror.

  That hundred would buy a good, long drunk, wouldn’t it, Deke?

  The shaggy thing he hadn’t told Detective Downs about, and Not yet, he tells himself again. Maybe later on, maybe, and maybe not. Some questions you never answer, no matter who’s doing the asking, no matter how many badges he has or how much money he’s offering.

  “Just start your ass walking,” he says out loud, no one around to hear him so no one to give two shits if he talks to himself. Better than the booze, talking to himself, walking in the cold, and so he turns left, following the sidewalk east to the corner of Twentieth Street. There’s an old man, the old bum standing there in a brown corduroy jacket and filthy jeans, work boots a size or two too big for his feet, and he glares at Deacon with his cloudy blue eyes.

  “Gotta dollar fifty?” he asks. “Only need a dollar fifty to get my medicines. Help a feller out, mister.”

  The bum smells like soured wine and body odor, and Deacon reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. “Yeah, I got a dollar fifty,” he says. “You better start thinking about finding a warm place to sleep tonight. You know they won’t let you in Jimmy Hale if you’re drunk.”

  “I don’t go to that damned old mission no more,” the bum replies. “I go over to the Firehouse. The preacher over there, he ain’t such an ass.”

  “Well, they still won’t let you in if they know you’re drunk.”

  “I ain’t gonna be drunk tonight. Just gotta get me my medicines, that’s all. Doctor says it’s my goddamn liver. Says I prob’ly ain’t even gonna live till Thanksgivin’. Now, ain’t that some fine shit, mister? Somebody sayin’ you ain’t even living till Thanksgivin’?”

  “I’m sorry,” Deacon says, and there’s nothing in his wallet but the hundred the detective slipped him, the bribe so he’d get in the car and take the ride across town to Soda’s apartment.

  “Maybe he was wrong,” Deacon says, and the old man blinks and looks confused.

  “Who?”

  “Your doctor. Maybe he was wrong.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think so.”

  Deacon looks at the hundred a moment, remembering when that would have been a small fortune to him, not that long ago, and then he hands it to the bum.

  “Don’t you lose this, you hear me? Whatever you don’t spend today, you put it away someplace safe.”

  “My god,” the man mumbles, licking his chapped lips and staring at the bill in his hand. “No way, mister. No, no, no. You can’t just give me a hundred-dollar bill.”

  “Why not? You need it more than me.”

  “Why not? Jesus. ’Cause someone’s gonna think I stole it, that’s why not. Or someone’ll hear I got it and bash my brains out to steal it. You can’t just go givin’ a bum who ain’t even gonna live to see Thanksgivin’ a goddamn hundred dollars.”

  “I already did. It’s yours now. I don’t want it,” and Deacon glances anxiously southeast, at the tall brick buildings standing between him and home.

  “But somebody’ll kill me, mister. I’ll wind up dead or in jail. Maybe both. Ain’t you got nothin’ a little smaller?”

  “No,” Deacon says. “I don’t. Just take it,” and he leaves the bum staring dumbfounded at the detective’s blood money; he turns north up Twentieth, walking quickly away from home.

  “I only needed a buck fifty!” the bum shouts after him.

  Deacon ignores him and keeps walking, past vacant storefronts and alleyways, four banks at one intersection and an Episcopal church cringing in their shadows. Keeps his eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk, the litter and pigeon shit smears; if he doesn’t have to stop, he’ll be at the park soon, the park and the library, and he can spend what’s left of the day reading. Hiding in books and magazines until Chance gets home, and he feels a little better already, the money gone and with it at least some small part of the temptation. The thirst is still there, still burning, but not so easy to quench now, and at least that’s something.

  He looks both ways, then crosses Seventh Avenue to Linn Park and the two bronze soldiers standing guard on their tall granite pedestals. The one on the left a remembrance of the first World War, a doughboy frozen forever in his last, desperate dash across no-man’s-land, bronze barbed wire twined about his ankles, his rifle and bayonet clutched in verdigris hands. And the soldier on the right to honor the men who died in earlier, half-forgotten conflicts—the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippines Insurrection—and he stands at attention, his rifle held across his chest, proud soldier who’s never even dreamed the nightmares of trench warfare and machine guns, mustard gas and tanks. And in between these mute and immobile sentries stands a fifty-foot limestone obelisk dedicated to the Confederate dead. Deacon pauses on the steps near the base of the obelisk, last opportunity for a smoke before the library, and he fishes a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. He’s smoking way too much these days, but he supposes that’s like talking to himself, better than the drinking, at least as far as Chance is concerned.

  “Hey there, stranger,” someone says, familiar girl voice grown unfamiliar because he hasn’t heard it in so many months now—a whole year, almost—and when he looks up from his lighter and the burning tip of his cigarette, there’s Sadie Jasper walking towards him from the library, Sadie’s quick, determined stride, as if she always has someplace to be and she’s always five minutes late. Her cultivated pallor and hair like a fire engine, black lips and her blue eyes paler than the October sky and ringed by so much mascara and eyeliner they look bruised. Seeing her again, not just Sadie but the old life she represents, Deacon feels something in his throat, his belly, an almost-pain that’s part nostalgia and part dread. Sadie’s carrying a bundle of books in her arms, and she sets them down on the sidewalk at his feet.

  “No one ever sees you around anymore,” she says and frowns. “But I guess you’re respectable now, right? Can’t risk being seen hanging out with a bunch of freaks and barflies.”

  “Is that how it is?” and Deacon fidgets self-consciously with the simple white-gold band on his left hand. It glints dull in the afternoon sunlight, and he takes a deep drag off his Camel. His headache is getting worse, and he can’t think, isn’t sure what to say next.

  “I don’t know which is harder to believe, that Deke Silvey’s sober or that he’s married.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “You tell me,” and then she bums a cigarette, and he lights it for her, and they stand smoking beneath the obelisk.

  “You hear about Soda?” Sadie asks, and Deacon can feel the goose bumps on his arms and the short hairs prickling at the nape of his neck, the shiver inside that his mother always said meant a possum was walking on his grave.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I heard.”

  “He was a weasel, but damn, I never pegged him for a suicide.”
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  “Is that what you heard, that Soda killed himself?”

  “Yep,” and Sadie makes a pistol of her right thumb and index finger and sets the barrel against her temple. “Sheryl’s big brother’s a cop, and he told her that Soda blew his head completely off. Said he used a shotgun.”

  “Yeah, well, word sure gets around fast,” Deacon mutters and shakes his head, glancing down at the stack of books that Sadie’s deposited on the steps, a copy of the Mabinogion on top and Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment underneath that. “You still working on the novel?” he asks her.

  “On and off,” she replies, sighs and kicks gently at the stack of books with the pointy toe of her boot. “I think it’s just about decided it doesn’t want to be a novel. Maybe I’ll write something else, instead. Maybe it wants to be short stories. But thanks for asking. I’m surprised you even remember that.”

  “Of course I remember. I liked that one chapter you let me read last year. I liked your style. You know, your voice.”

  “My voice?” Sadie laughs and takes a long drag off her cigarette. “My last rejection slip called my style ‘obtuse’ and ‘contrived.’”

  “That’s bullshit. I’d call it Faulknerian, à la The Sound and the Fury.”

  “Oh, you mean the way I liked to run words together to make new adjectives? Well, I don’t do that anymore. It just kept pissing people off.”

  “Yeah, well, I still liked that one chapter you let me read.”

  “It sucked ass.”

  “Hey, what the hell do I know.”

  “That’s not what I meant, moron,” and she looks up at him with those cold blue eyes, and for a moment it might still be the world before, the long days and nights of boozing and the careless ease of a life filled with slackers and layabouts, dead-end hipsters, people without ambition or all their ambitions out of reach and they know it so what’s the use trying. The life he walked away from for Chance, the bars and punker shows replaced with AA meetings and his monthly counseling sessions. And it would be so simple to go back, as simple as twisting the cap off a bottle of Popov or Mad Dog. As easy as following Sadie home or to the nearest watering hole.

  “I gotta run,” she says. “There’s gonna be a thing for Soda at The Plaza tonight, and I told Sheryl I’d help tend bar. You should drop by. You could bring the little wifey thing. Tell her we won’t bite.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Sadie.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I know. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all.” And she stands on tiptoes and hugs him around the neck, hugs him hard, and Sadie Jasper smells like vanilla and roses and the spicy smoke of clove cigarettes. He hugs her back with one arm, a surprised and noncommittal hug. “I miss you,” she says, almost whispering. “We all miss you, Deke.”

  “I miss you, too. Don’t think I don’t.”

  She releases him then, smiles her strange, sad smile, and for a moment Sadie just stands there, very still, staring at Deacon until he feels the possum scamper across his grave again. Always something a little too spooky about this girl, like maybe the death-rocker affectations are only a mask to hide a more genuine darkness; he smiles back and drops the butt of his cigarette to the sidewalk, grinds it out with the heel of his shoe.

  “I gotta run,” she says again, finally taking her eyes off him, and she stoops to retrieve her library books. The Mabinogion slides off the top of the stack, and Deacon catches it before it hits the sidewalk.

  “Thanks,” Sadie says. “Now, you take care of yourself, Deke. And tell that wife of yours if I ever hear she ain’t doing right by you, she’s gonna be in for a serious butt-whuppin’,” and sure, he laughs, sure, you bet, and then she’s gone, crossing the street to the bus stop. She waves once, and Deacon waves back, before he turns and walks quickly past the magnolias and statues to the sanctuary of the library doors.

  Deacon had been sober for almost four months when Chance sold her grandfather’s big house, the tall white house overlooking the dingy gray carpet of Birmingham from the side of Red Mountain. The place where she’d lived most of her life, since her parents died when she was barely five years old and her grandparents took her in. The little attic bedroom that Chance had been unwilling to vacate even after they were married, never mind they had the whole house to themselves, her grandfather dead three years, and sometimes Deacon thinks she only married him because she couldn’t stand the thought of living in that house alone with the ghosts of her grandparents.

  He made the mistake of saying that once—“Sometimes I think you only married me so you wouldn’t be alone,” reckless words he should have always kept to himself, but that was one of the endless, thirsty days when he could think of nothing but having a drink, just one drink, one very small goddamned drink. The anger and desperation building up inside him all day long, piling up like afternoon storm clouds on a sizzling summer day. And finally Chance had done or said something to piss him off, something inconsequential, something he’d forget a long, long time before he would ever forget the way she turned and stared at him with her hard green eyes. Even his thirst shriveling at the look she gave him with those eyes, the look that said I can leave you anytime I want, Deacon Silvey. Don’t you ever think I can’t.

  He apologized and spent the rest of the day alone in the basement, banging about uselessly with a crescent wrench, pretending to work on the house’s leaky copper plumping. Those ancient pipes were one of the reasons that Chance finally gave him for wanting to sell the place, the pipes and the furnace that rarely worked, the termites that were eating the back porch, the roof that needed reshingling, property taxes and the grass that Deacon couldn’t be bothered to mow. Her dissertation finally finished, and there’d been a good job waiting for her at the university, an assistant professorship in the geology department.

  “I just don’t want to have to worry about the place anymore,” she said one morning at breakfast, and Deacon watched her silently across the kitchen table, uncertain how much of this was his decision to make, and what, if anything, he ought to say.

  “I don’t know how Granddad kept it together all that time. I feel like it’s about to come crashing down around my ears.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Deacon said, and she shook her head and stared out the window at the weedy backyard.

  “It’s bad enough.”

  Deacon sipped at his scalding black coffee, waiting for her to say something else, waiting for his cue to say anything useful.

  “Alice wants me to look at some lofts down on Morris,” she said without taking her eyes off the window.

  “You think we could afford that, I mean—”

  “I’m making decent money now, and we should get a good price for the house. It wouldn’t hurt our savings account.”

  And Deacon waited for her to say, You could get a job, but she didn’t, looked away from the backyard and took a bite of her toast and apple butter instead.

  “I just don’t want you to do something you might wind up regretting,” he said. “I mean, this is your home. You’ve lived here all your life.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to live here the rest of my life.”

  Deacon shook his head, already sorry that he’d said anything at all. “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed.

  And so Chance sold the house, the house and half the things in it, antiques and her grandfather’s guns, and they moved downtown into a renovated warehouse at the eastern end of Morris Avenue. What the woman from the realty agency kept referring to as the “historic loft district,” though Deacon could remember when the long cobblestone street had been something else entirely. Not so long ago, the early ’90s, back when Morris was only a neglected patchwork of warehouses struggling to stay in business and abandoned buildings dating to the turn of the last century and before. A couple of gay bars and one punk hangout called Dr. Jekyll’s, a coffeehouse and The Peanut Depot, which sold freshly roasted peanuts in gigantic burlap sacks. A place where homeless men slept in doorways and built fires on
the unused loading docks, and sensible people avoided the poorly lit avenue after dark. But most of that time had been scrubbed away to make room for offices and art galleries, apartments and condos for yuppies who wanted to flirt with city life without leaving the reliable provincialism of Birmingham behind.

  “And what do you do, Mr. Silvey?” the real-estate agent asked him while Chance filled in the credit history on their application.

  “Mostly I try to stay sober,” he replied, and Chance glared at him from the other side of the room.

  A nervous little laugh from the agent, and then she coughed and smiled at him expectantly, suspiciously, waiting for the real answer, and he wanted to take Chance and drive back to the big white house on the other side of town. Wanted to tell this woman she could go straight to hell and take her “historic loft district” with her. And who cared if the pipes leaked or there was no heat in the winter, so long as they didn’t have to answer questions from the likes of her.

  “Deke’s thinking of going back to school soon,” Chance said before he could make things worse, and the woman’s face seemed to brighten a little at the news.

  “Is that so?” she asked him, and he nodded, even though it wasn’t.

  “Deke was at Emory for two years,” Chance said, looking back down at the application, filling in another empty space with the ballpoint pen the real-estate agent had given her.

  “Emory,” the woman repeated approvingly. “Were you studying medicine, Mr. Silvey, or law?”

  “Philosophy,” Deacon answered, which was true, a life he’d lived and lost what seemed like a hundred years ago, before the booze had become the only thing that got him from one day to the next, before he’d come to Birmingham looking for nothing in particular but a change of scenery.

  “Well, that must be very interesting,” the woman said, but the doubt was creeping back into her voice.

  “I used to think so,” Deacon said. “But I used to think a whole lot of silly things,” and then he excused himself and waited downstairs behind the wheel of Chance’s rusty old Impala while she finished. He smoked and listened to an ’80s station on the radio, Big Country and Oingo Boingo, trying to decide whether he should just cut to the chase and take the bus home, instead. When Chance came downstairs with the real-estate agent, she was smiling, wearing her cheerful mask until the woman drove away in a shiny black Beemer, and then the mask slipped, and he could see the anger waiting for him underneath. Chance didn’t get into the car, stood at the driver’s-side door and stared down Morris towards the train tracks that divided the city neatly in half.