Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  Her grandmother died when Chance was still a teenager, a suicide that no one ever really understood; no convenient, exegetic note left behind for the living, no warning signs before Esther Matthews got dressed late one stormy night and hanged herself from a tree behind the big house on Red Mountain. Her grandfather lived on for almost another ten years, his final heart attack coming shortly before Chance received her MA. Together, they’d been half her life, and paleontology the other half, all she’d ever needed until Deacon Silvey came along to complicate things. The little girl who really did know what she wanted from the world when she was only six, a life like her grandparents’, a life spent teasing answers from the rocks, all the mysteries of time laid out before her, and she never seriously considered doing anything else.

  And this trip to Atlanta to supply fossils for a temporary display at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History—“At the River’s Edge: Fish with Feet.” A whole exhibit built around the work that Chance had begun when she was still an undergraduate, after she’d discovered the fossilized remains of a creature that straddled the evolutionary fence between fish and amphibians. The past seven years of her life spent collecting from the strip mines and road cuts where she’d first found her “missing link,” gathering bits of skull and vertebrae and eight-fingered feet that were not quite done with being fins. Her “indecisive pollywogs,” as Alice Sprinkle liked to call them.

  The exhibit was already scheduled before Chance learned that she was pregnant, and she was determined to see it through to completion. It was one of her other babies, after all, just like the fossils and her publications. Her responsibility, her obligation, and she wouldn’t have Alice or anyone else tying up her loose ends, not if she could help it. Most of the day before spent packing the fossils for the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Birmingham to Atlanta, carefully wrapping each specimen in tissue paper and cotton and Bubble Wrap before placing them between layers of foam rubber carved out to accommodate each piece. The packing and the paperwork, making sure that all the loan forms were in order; more than fifty specimens, all told, that she was entrusting to someone else’s care, six months that they would be out of her protection, and Alice joked that at least it was good practice for motherhood.

  “I won’t be that kind of a mother,” Chance said, wrapping a siderite concretion containing the skull of a small coelacanth.

  Alice stopped nailing the lid shut on one of the army surplus ammo crates that would contain the fossils during the drive to Atlanta, and she stared at Chance, shook her head and chuckled.

  “Right. I can just imagine the first day you have to leave the poor kid with a nanny, or at preschool. Hell, you’ll probably pack it in excelsior and write a catalog number on its butt.”

  Chance’s latest discovery, and the fossil that would form the centerpiece of the Fernbank exhibit, was an almost complete skeleton of a creature that would have been a veritable titan in the steamy Coal Age swamps where it had died. Something that must have looked more than a little bit like a stubby, snub-nosed alligator when it was alive and breathing, three hundred million years before she found its petrified skeleton exposed by bulldozers clearing a patch of land north of Birmingham to make room for a new Wal-Mart.

  The university had managed to persuade the construction company to halt work at the site for three days, just long enough for her to oversee the specimen’s recovery, and then Chance spent four long months preparing it. Slowly, painstakingly removing the hard siltstone matrix with an Air Scribe until the entire left side of the skeleton was exposed in bas-relief, jet-black bones set in stone the color of ash. The bulldozer’s blade had destroyed the very tip end of the tail, but the rest was there, all twelve feet, eight inches of the creature’s spectacular frame. In a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, she described the fossil and named it Megalopseudosuchus alabamaensis.

  The week the paper was released, the geology department had thrown a surprise party for Chance, including a huge layer cake baked into something vaguely approximating the shape of her monstrous amphibian and covered with dark green, lime-flavored icing. Deacon came, though he spent most of the party sitting alone in a corner nursing a Coke and pretending to read an old issue of Scientific American. Pretending all of it didn’t make him uncomfortable, the noise and nerdy academic jokes, Chance’s success. But she knew better. Knew that some part of him resented her, and sooner or later that was something they would have to face, one way or another.

  Driving home afterwards, a cold rain and the sky like folds of purple-gray velvet. “I’m really proud of you, you know,” Deacon said. “Maybe I never say it like I should, but I am. I’m very proud of you. Your goddamn brain, it amazes me…” and he trailed off, then, turned onto Morris Avenue, the tires bump-bump-bumping over the wet cobblestones.

  “Thank you,” she said softly and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

  “No, I mean it. You really do amaze me.”

  “I know,” she said and smiled, and for the smallest part of a second Deacon smiled, too. The rain drummed softly on the roof of the old Impala, and in a couple minutes more they were home.

  Alice drives slowly past the main entrance to the museum, squat and sensible building of brick and glass, past the visitor parking lot to a loading platform located in the rear. There are two young men waiting there to unload the heavy crates from the back of the Toyota, and the collection’s manager, a middle-aged woman named Irene Mesmer, is waiting with them. Alice talks to her, and Chance watches nervously and chews at a thumbnail while the men transfer her fossils from the truck to the concrete platform, a job she’d be handling herself if she were able. When one of them sets a crate down too roughly for her liking, she scowls and asks him to be more careful, please, and he apologizes and goes back to work.

  “Have you ever visited Fernbank before, Dr. Silvey?” Irene Mesmer asks in a heavy Charlotte accent, and Chance nods, not taking her eyes off the workmen and the crates.

  “Yeah. But I was just a little kid.”

  “So you haven’t seen the new dinosaurs?”

  “No,” Chance says.

  “Well, then, why don’t I give you both a quick tour?”

  “I think that would be great,” Alice says enthusiastically, glancing at Chance, who sighs and shrugs her wide shoulders.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should wait here. I could catch up with you guys later on.”

  “You’ll have to excuse her,” Alice says, speaking to the collections manager. “She had to pee back at the state line, and I’m afraid I might not have stopped soon enough. There may have been irreversible brain damage.”

  “I just want to watch,” Chance says, annoyed now, wishing Alice and the other woman would leave her alone, wishing she were in any shape to lift the crates herself. The last hour spent trying to forget whatever she did or didn’t see back at the welcome center, and now she’d just like to be left alone to oversee the unloading.

  “I promise, Dr. Silvey, Bill and Andrew here know what they’re doing. They’ve unpacked fossils before.”

  “They’ve never unpacked my fossils before.”

  One of the men, skinny, muscular, in a gray Atlanta Braves sweatshirt and a red baseball cap turned around backwards, sets down a crate marked THIS SIDE UP and MORRIS FISH; he smiles for Chance and nods his head reassuringly.

  “No, ma’am. But last summer, I worked for the High Museum and helped unload a whole shipment of those fancy Fabergé eggs. And I expect they’re a whole lot more fragile than your fossils here.”

  Chance stares at him, offended, and, “No,” she replies. “Not necessarily.”

  “They can handle it, Chance.” Alice says, “C’mon, let’s go see some dinos,” and she takes Chance’s arm and leads her into the building.

  The museum was designed around a great central atrium capped with a vaulted dome of steel and glass, whitewashed beams to form the formerets and tiercerons, the transverse arches and diagonal buttresses. An industrial cathe
dral of welds and bolts instead of keystones and mortar, and the October afternoon sunlight floods into the atrium, warm and clean, illuminating the Cretaceous giants below. Chance stands with Alice on one of the balconies, staring in wonder at the skeletons, her fossils and the two workmen momentarily forgotten, even the weird shit at the rest stop forgotten for now.

  “They’re not the real skeletons, of course,” Irene says apologetically. “They’re only fiberglass and resin casts. The real bones are still in Argentina.”

  “Of course,” Chance says, and she takes a step closer to the edge of the balcony. Below, the skeleton of an impossibly immense titanosaurid sauropod, Argentinosaurus, is pursued by the skeleton of a hungry Giganotosaurus. The sauropod is one hundred and twenty-six feet long from its small head to the end of its whiplash tail, too enormous to have ever been real, a creature to put all other dragons to shame. Its pursuer, larger even than Tyrannosaurus rex, seems puny by comparison. The air around and above the dinosaurs is filled with the delicate skeletons of flying reptiles suspended on not-quite invisible wires, a whole flock of Pterodaustro, their peculiar flamingo-like jaws lined with bristles for filter feeding, and a couple of the much larger Anhanguera like something a desperate, escaping vampire might become. A moment forever lost in time, some South American floodplain or tropical forest more than ninety million years ago, and these giants striding beneath the light of a younger sun, the earth literally shaking beneath their feet.

  “It’s beautiful,” Chance says.

  Irene makes a satisfied sound deep in her throat, and “Yes,” she says. “We’re very proud of it, Dr. Silvey.”

  “Please, just Chance. Only my students call me Dr. Silvey.”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  “That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” Chance says, and she leans a little way out over the railing, letting the yellow-white sun bathe her face. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”

  “Too bad we don’t have anything like this in Birmingham,” Alice says and puts one hand on Chance’s back, twining thick fingers protectively around the straps of her overalls.

  “I’m fine,” Chance mumbles. “I’m not going to fall,” but Alice holds on anyway.

  “Whatever became of the Red Mountain Museum?” Irene asks. “They had that wonderful mosasaur skeleton.”

  Alice frowns and shakes her head. “The city decided it would rather have a science center for the kiddies than a real museum. They closed Red Mountain down back in ’94. Now that wonderful mosasaur’s sitting in a crate in the attic of the kiddy place.”

  “Oh,” the collections manager says. “Well, that’s a shame.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Chance whispers, still warming her face and staring down at the magnificent Patagonian dinosaurs. “But that’s Birmingham for you. One step forward, two steps back.”

  A moment of silence, then, and Chance shuts her eyes and imagines the flutter of leathery pterosaur wings, the deafening bellow of the Argentinosaurus as the Giganotosaurus hisses and lunges at the sauropod’s unprotected flanks.

  “Would y’all like to see the hall where your fossils will be displayed? It’s right downstairs.”

  “Yes, we would,” Alice says, and Chance opens her eyes, reluctantly letting go of the daydream, and the brilliant noise and violence of a Cretaceous day dissolves instantly back into fiberglass bones and the black iron support rods that hold them up.

  “The diorama’s almost finished. The exhibits department at the Field Museum in Chicago helped us design it, you know. We’ll be keeping it on permanently.”

  Chance takes a last look at the giants, silently wishes the sauropod luck, and then the collections manager leads them along the balcony to a waiting elevator.

  “Some lives are more unlikely than others,” Chance once wrote in her diary, seventeen years old and already it had seemed to her that she’d enjoyed more odd luck and misfortune than most people twice her age, more than some people might experience in their entire lives. Small unlikelihoods and bigger ones, the trivial and profound weaving accidental trails about her. The death of her parents and her unlikely survival, to start with, both of them killed and her left with nothing worse than a broken arm. “A miracle,” one of the doctors said, though Chance had always suspected he’d actually meant something a little more prosaic. Not a miracle, just damned unlikely.

  And the fact that Chance ever met Deacon Silvey at all, much less fell in love with him, as unlikely as anything else in her unlikely life. Inhabitants of the same small city, but existing in two entirely different worlds. Deacon lost in his ruin of bars and dead-end jobs, firmly stuck on the fast track to nowhere, and Chance rarely looking up from her textbooks, the Golden Key honor student, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, and her first scientific paper published when she was still an undergraduate. The good girl, too-smart girl all set to write her own ticket out into the real world hiding somewhere beyond the rust and slag-heap confines of Birmingham.

  But she met him anyway, the summer night that she and Elise Alden got drunk on Jack Daniel’s and walked from Chance’s house to the homely little park at the end of Nineteenth Street, a few months before Elise moved away to Atlanta. Not really much of a park at all, though it had a few dogwood trees, a weathered, graffiti-scarred gazebo with a picnic table, and the gated entrance to the city’s old water works tunnel. A place that Chance had always avoided because it had a reputation as a hangout for junkies, a reputation that had earned it the nickname Needle Park.

  Following the “nature trail” down from Sixteenth Avenue into the park, limestone gravel scattered between railroad ties, a crude footpath for curious urban hikers who’d never seen kudzu and poison ivy and blackberry briers up close. Halfway down and Chance and Elise heard voices, angry voices, someone shouting, and “Come on,” Chance said, leaning against a tree so she wouldn’t fall down. “Let’s go back home.”

  “Wait a minute. I want to see what’s happening,” and Elise took another step along the trail, then stopped and peered through darkness and a thicket of briers at the dimly lit park below.

  “What’s happening is none of our goddamn business,” Chance said, wishing she wasn’t starting to feel nauseous, that the world would stop spinning just long enough for her to drag Elise’s dumb ass back home where it was safe and she could at least be sick in a toilet instead of in the bushes.

  “Oh, Christ. It’s a couple of big guys beating up a hippie.”

  “Too bad,” Chance said. She took a deep breath and looked up at the sky, the branches overhead, Heaven far too stained by streetlights for her to ever see the stars. A cacophony of hateful male voices and the cicadas screaming in the trees, and she tried to remember why coming down here had ever seemed like a good idea.

  “I think they might be skinheads,” Elise whispered excitedly.

  “They’re not skinheads.”

  “Well, one of them has a big swastika on his T-shirt.”

  “Good. I’m going home now.”

  “Oh god, Chance. He has a knife.”

  “Now, Elise.”

  “Hey, fuckface!” Elise shouted at the guy with the knife. “Yeah, you. Leave him alone, or I’m gonna call the cops!”

  The guy growled back something that Chance couldn’t quite make out, but she understood his meaning well enough, no need to speak pit bull when one of them starts barking at you. She grabbed for the collar of Elise’s shirt and missed, just a humid handful of night air for her trouble, and Elise was already scrambling towards the little gazebo at the end of the steep trail.

  “That asshole’s gonna cut your throat!” Chance screamed and stumbled after her.

  But there was someone else, waiting in the gazebo, someone they hadn’t noticed before, gaunt man hidden in the shadows, and Chance almost screamed when she saw him. He was sitting alone at the picnic table, a pint liquor bottle in front of him. When he saw Elise and Chance, he held one hand out like a traffic cop.

  “Is that your little girlfriend, faggot?”
the guy with the knife asked the hippie. “Is that your girlfriend coming to save your sorry faggot ass?”

  “Don’t move, either one of you,” the man beneath the gazebo whispered. “Don’t make a single goddamn sound,” and he stood up, then, and Chance could see how tall he was. She saw something clutched tight in his right hand, too, but she didn’t realize what it was until he stepped out of the shadows. A piece of board that might have been part of the picnic table once, and the guy with the knife turned towards him while the other guy, the one with the swastika on his T-shirt, kicked the hippie in the stomach. The tall man from the gazebo held the piece of board concealed behind his back as he walked quickly towards the skinhead with the knife.

  “Hell no, it ain’t your little girlfriend. It’s your goddamn faggot boyfriend.”

  “Maybe he wants a taste of this shit, too,” the guy in the Nazi shirt said and kicked the hippie again. “Maybe he wants to suck our dicks.”

  “Is that it?” the skinhead with the knife asked. “You want to suck on my fuckstick, faggot?”

  The board came out from behind the tall man’s back and smashed the skinhead in the face, a black spray of blood from his nose and mouth, his shattered front teeth like broken ivory pegs, and the knife slipped from his hand to the grass. The tall man kicked the knife away and swung the board again, catching the second guy hard across the back of his shaved head. A loud crack, the sound of someone hitting a baseball, hitting a home run, and the skinhead dropped to his knees without a word, then fell over face forward on top of the hippie.

  “Fuck,” Elise whispered, her voice equal parts shock and admiration, and Chance, who’d finally had enough, sat down at the picnic table and puked on the ground between her shoes. And maybe she passed out for a while, because just a moment later the tall man was bending over her, wiping her face with a handkerchief, and both the skinheads and the hippie were gone. She could hear police sirens in the distance, getting closer. Chance’s stomach rolled again, cramped, and she doubled over.