Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Why didn’t you call Harold?” she asks Deacon and sets the bottle down a safe distance away, out of reach, on top of the television.

  “I didn’t want to talk to fucking Harold. I wanted a drink.”

  “You could have called Dr. Winman. You could have said something when you called me.”

  “I have a headache,” Deacon said and rubbed at the furrowed spot between his eyebrows. “And I don’t want to have this conversation right now.”

  “Well that’s just too bad, Deke. Because I’m not going to let you throw away everything you’ve accomplished over one bad day.”

  Deacon opens an eye and glares at her.

  “No offense, babe, but you don’t have any goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then why don’t you enlighten me,” Chance replies, pushing down the anger, resisting the weary, exasperated part of her that wants to give the bottle right back to him and tell Deacon to go fuck himself.

  “You remember a guy named Soda? Skinny little fuck with a skateboard.”

  “No,” Chance says. “I don’t. What about him?”

  Down on the street a horn blows, and Chance remembers Alice, waiting dutifully in her truck. “Shit,” she hisses and crosses the room to one of the tall front windows. She waves, and Alice honks the horn again.

  “What the hell is that all about?” Deacon asks, and “It’s just Alice,” Chance tells him. “She wanted to make sure I got inside okay.”

  “Maybe you should have married her, instead.”

  Chance ignores him and watches as the old Toyota pulls away from the curb and heads east down First Avenue.

  “I’m sure Alice would’ve made you a fine husband.”

  “Deke, can we please not do this tonight?” and she rests her forehead against the windowpane, stares down at the sidewalk bathed in the glow of streetlights. “I’ll talk if you want to talk, but I haven’t had such a good day myself, and I just don’t think I’m up to fighting tonight.”

  “Whatever,” Deacon says, and when she turns around he’s popping the top off the bottle of Fioricet.

  “How many of those have you taken today?” she asks him.

  “Not nearly enough, obviously.”

  Chance clumsily eases her body into an armchair near the window and watches while Deke dry-swallows two of the tablets. Maybe if she’d listened to Alice and stayed in Birmingham, or maybe if she’d had a little more time when he called, and If wishes were horses, she thinks, beggars would ride.

  “What happened to Soda?” she asks.

  “Soda is dead. Someone—” and then he stops and silently stares at the prescription bottle for a moment. “You really don’t want to hear this.”

  “If it’s got you this upset, I have to hear it, Deke. I can’t help you if I don’t even know what’s going on.”

  Deacon takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes again. “You’re half right,” he says.

  “Damn it, if you’re not even willing to let me try—”

  “Did all the fossils make it in one piece? All your little frogs and fishies?”

  “I don’t want to talk about the damned fossils right now. I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  Deacon opens his eyes and turns his head towards her; his bleary green eyes grown so much darker tonight, filled with the thirst and all his secret pains, all the things he’ll never tell her no matter how many times she asks. The blind spots he keeps for himself, and most of the time that’s fine by Chance, if that’s the way he wants it, as long as he stays off the booze.

  “Someone killed him last night,” he says, the words slipping reluctantly from his lips. “Gutted him like a catfish and left his head in a pillowcase under his bathroom sink.”

  “Jesus, Deke.”

  “So the cops came to see me this morning, about an hour after you left, because that prick Vince Hammond in Atlanta told them I might be able to help.”

  “You might be—” Chance starts, then stops and looks down at her hands folded across her belly.

  “I told you that you didn’t want to hear this.”

  “But you told them to leave you alone, right?” Chance asks him, almost whispering now. “You told them you didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  “No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

  “You promised me, Deke. You promised me that was all in the past. You said you didn’t want anything else to do with that shit ever again.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Then why’d you do it? Why’d you go with them?”

  “I didn’t say I went anywhere with them.”

  “But you did. That’s why you’ve got a migraine now, isn’t it? That’s why you bought that bottle of whiskey.”

  Deacon sighs and rubs at his forehead again. “I haven’t held down a job in almost a year,” he says. “I sit here, day after day, waiting for you to come home—”

  “Your job is to stay sober. That’s all I need you to do.”

  “Hell, you’re not asking for much, are you?” he mumbles, and the bitterness in his voice, the cold resentment, is almost more than she can handle right now, almost that one last straw. Chance bites hard at her lower lip and keeps her eyes on her belly.

  Inside her, the baby moves.

  “I’m sorry,” Deacon says and gets up off the sofa, stands there a moment squinting at the bottle of whiskey sitting on the television set. “Sometimes I think it’s eating me up inside, like a cancer.”

  Chance nods, because she knows he’s telling her the truth, but she doesn’t look at him. She’s determined that she isn’t going to start crying, not this time, not tonight, not with Deacon so close to the edge.

  “So…” she says, and has to stop and swallow before she can go on, her mouth gone as dry as sun-bleached bones. “They asked you to look at Soda’s body.”

  “I didn’t know it was Soda. I didn’t know it was him until we pulled up out front of his place. They said they didn’t have any idea I knew him.”

  “You think they were telling you the truth?”

  “Probably. They didn’t have anything to gain by lying to me.”

  “Maybe they thought you wouldn’t go with them, if you knew.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Deacon says, turning away from Chance, and he goes to the refrigerator, the small kitchen divided from the living room by nothing but empty space and imaginary boundaries. She looks up, and he’s standing there framed in the white icebox glare, so tall and thin. Deacon takes out a bottle of water and shuts the refrigerator door again.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks her.

  “I’m all right. I’ll get something in a little while.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known it was him,” Deacon says, and then he screws the cap off the bottle and takes a long drink.

  “It was your decision,” Chance whispers, speaking so low now she’s not even sure he can hear her.

  “God, I hate this stuff,” he says, grimaces and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “If it comes from the tap, it tastes like a goddamn swimming pool. If it comes out of a bottle, it tastes like plastic.”

  “It’s good for you,” Chance says.

  Deacon sets the bottle down on the kitchen counter and stares at her across the wide room. Outside, a big truck rumbles past the building, and the windows rattle softly in their aluminum frames.

  “I should have told them no,” Deacon says when the truck has passed and it’s almost quiet again, only the muffled sound of someone’s stereo coming from the apartment next door. “I should have told that detective that Hammond was pulling their leg.”

  “Well, so what happened? What did you see?” and she watches while he takes another drink from the bottle, wishing she could come in again and start this whole scene over, wondering if there’s any way it could play itself out differently. No, she thinks. It would be the same, exactly the same.

  “You don’t have to humor me, Chance.”

  “I’m not humoring you.
I just asked you a question.”

  Deacon screws the cap back on the water bottle and returns it to the refrigerator. “There’s leftover Chinese in here,” he says, “if you’re hungry.”

  “What did you see there, Deke? Did you see the person that killed him?”

  He shuts the fridge and stands with his back to her, pretending to inspect the assortment of magnets and sticky notes on the freezer door.

  “You don’t believe I saw anything. It’s all just part of my addictive, delusional personality, remember?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore what I believe,” she says, wanting to sound sincere, wanting to get past this to some place she can help him, and the pint of Jack Daniel’s won’t be an ax hanging over them. Deacon shakes his head and comes back to his place on the sofa, his bare feet making hardly any sound on the hardwood floor.

  “Did you see what they wanted you to see?” Chance asks, and he shrugs and props his feet on the coffee table.

  “I saw something. I wouldn’t have this splitting fucking headache right now if I hadn’t seen something. But I’m not sure what it was. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything they wanted me to see.”

  “But you told them, whatever it was.”

  “Nope,” Deacon says. “I lied. I told them I didn’t see anything at all.”

  “What’d you do that for?” Chance asks, surprised, and she leans as far forward in the chair as her belly will allow, straining to close the distance between them, and the baby moves again.

  “You don’t tell the man what the man don’t want to hear.”

  “But you think you saw the killer?”

  “I already told you, I don’t know what I saw.”

  Chance leans back in the armchair again. The lamplight through the whiskey bottle is casting a tea-stained reflection on the wall. She looks up at the high ceilings, the crossbeams lost in shadow, and “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I can’t believe you about these things, and I’m sorry I got upset. It doesn’t help either of us if I get upset.”

  “How’d the exhibit look?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Chance says, too tired to tell him that they changed the name without asking her and the new name doesn’t even make sense. Too tired to tell him about the dinosaurs and the Coal Age diorama. Too scared to tell him about the blood.

  “I think they’ll leave me alone now,” Deacon says. “If they don’t think I can help them, they won’t be back. I called Hammond from the library and told him to leave me the hell alone.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “I told him I was married now and you were pregnant. I told him I was staying clean and I don’t have time for this psychic shit. He doesn’t try to be an asshole. It just seems to come naturally.”

  “Deke, honey, will you please help me get these shoes off?” and Chance kicks at the corner of the coffee table with the toe of one sneaker. “I swear, I think my feet have died and gone to hell.”

  “I’m sorry I bought the bottle,” Deacon says. “It was stupid.”

  “Let’s just forget about it, okay? How’s your head?”

  “Either it’ll kill me or it’ll get better in a couple of days,” and Deacon slips off the sofa cushions, squats on the floor in front of Chance and begins unlacing her shoes. “I’ve got the Fioricet there, and I’ve got the Imitrex if it gets unbearable.”

  Chance runs both her strong hands though his short, uncombed hair; her fingertips pause at the sides of his head and, gently, she begins to massage his temples as he slips her right sneaker off.

  “Your feet are swollen,” he says.

  “I think I’m holding enough water to float the goddamn Titanic.”

  Deacon pulls off her other shoe and rubs her ankles while she continues massaging his temples. He closes his eyes and sits down on the floor at her feet.

  “I’m sober, Chance, and this time I’m going to stay sober.”

  “I know,” she whispers, but then glances nervously back at the whiskey bottle on the TV, as if it might have moved, as if it might have slithered away when she wasn’t paying attention.

  “I know,” she says again, and outside another truck rumbles past and the windows rattle.

  After Chance has fallen asleep, Deacon sits at the foot of the bed and stares out the window at the street, the whitewashed brick office building on the other side of Twenty-third, the limbs of the tall and spindly trees planted between the sidewalk and the asphalt tossed by the wind and all their dry leaves rattling together in the cryptic tongue of autumn. There’s a storm coming, and already he can smell the rain. The drapes billow in the breeze, and Deacon thinks maybe he should go ahead and shut the window now, before he dozes off and everything gets soaked. But the air pushed along before the thunderstorm feels clean and healthy, untouched and uncontaminated by the world; he doesn’t want to close the window, and he doesn’t want to go to sleep.

  His head feels like a bucket of broken glass and raw meat, and he wishes he had a cigarette. But Chance would raise hell if she caught him smoking in the apartment, especially the bedroom, and he doesn’t feel like getting dressed and standing alone in the stairwell. So he ignores the craving, so much of his life these days spent ignoring cravings that there are times when he thinks he could best be defined entirely in negatives, the collection of things he doesn’t do. The man who doesn’t drink. Or work. Or have visions of the secret things that murderers do when there’s no one around to stop them. The man so thirsty he would sell the last hour of his life for one sip of alcohol, something wet and warm to soothe the pain behind his eyes.

  He glances over his shoulder at Chance, lying on her back beneath the cornflower-blue comforter, the big goose-down comforter that she bought to match the walls. Her pregnant belly is a great blue dome and her mouth is open slightly, her hands clasped together beneath her chin so she almost looks like she’s praying. But Deacon doubts that Chance has ever prayed in her life, both her grandparents the sort of evangelical rationalists who subscribe to The Skeptical Inquirer and feel sorry for anyone still shackled by the chains of religion or any other stultifying superstition. Deacon suspects that Joe and Esther Matthews would have packed Chance off to a shrink at the first sign of an irrational thought.

  He turns back to the window and the night, annoyed at himself that he feels guilty for thinking such sour thoughts about her dead grandparents. Esther died years before he met Chance, and Joe was never anything but kind to him, even on the occasion or two he showed up drunk. But there are times when he wishes their influence on their granddaughter had been a little less profound.

  “You’re just jealous, asshole,” he says, not loud enough to wake her, and the drapes flap and flutter their agreement. The clean air washes over him like a balm, like clemency, something to scrub away the sights and smells of Soda’s gore-spattered hovel.

  They ordered a pizza for dinner, because that’s what Chance wanted, a huge pizza with extra olives, and then he watched CNN while she took a shower. Afterwards, despite his headache, he read to her from Dr. Seuss’ McElligot’s Pool, because Chance was convinced it was good for the baby to be read to, that Deacon’s voice could somehow help to gift their unborn child with its parents’ love of books. A hopeful, harmless Lamarckian trick to bias the roll of Darwinian dice, insurance against a stupid kid, but mostly he suspects Chance just wanted to hear the stories herself. Tonight, he only made it as far as the furry Eskimo Fish bound for warmer waters before she was asleep and snoring softly; Deacon closed the book and laid it aside, wondering if he would sleep, too, if he would make it to dawn without dipping into the Imitrex. The injections almost always work, but can leave him nauseous and vomiting, and he usually prefers taking the Fioricet tablets and riding out the migraines.

  He closes his eyes, and there’s Soda’s corpse waiting for him, lying beneath the red wheel and words painted on the wall in a dead man’s blood, the hard black line drawn underneath. The naked thing gnawing at Soda’s flesh is there too,
the naked woman, but a woman from some freak-show nightmare. She stops and looks towards him, her irises flashing iridescent red, and Deacon opens his eyes.

  The dry October leaves rattle in the wind, and the drapes make a sound like pterodactyl wings.

  She’s out there, somewhere, Deacon thinks, not wanting the thought in his head. Whoever she is, whyever she does it, she’s out there somewhere.

  He sits on the bed until the first heavy raindrops begin to fall, coming in and splashing themselves against the floor. Then he gets up and closes the window, pulls the drapes shut, and lies down next to Chance, and begins waiting for morning.

  The next day, and Chance sits in a chair near the lectern, sipping a can of Sprite, as the last students drift indifferently into the small, windowless auditorium. Her final day at work before maternity leave begins, and then Alice will be taking over her sophomore-level Evolution and the History of Life survey course. Biology-lite for non-majors, a magnet for business and humanities students looking for required science credits without getting in over their heads, and most of them are in way too deep anyway. She glances at the clock above the blackboard, 10:30, so it’s time to get things started, five minutes past time, but her back hurts too much for her to care.

  Students shuffle loose-leaf paper, cough, hastily flip textbook pages, talk among themselves in loud and hurried whispers, the muffled clamor caught between the lime-sherbet walls, beneath the too-bright fluorescent glare. Chance sets down her drink and slips on her reading glasses, picks up a stubby piece of chalk and turns to the blackboard. She writes NATURAL SELECTION = MECHANISM in tall, blocky letters, and then DARWIN and WALLACE underneath that, before turning back to the lectern and her notes.

  “Well,” she says and licks her dry lips. “Here we go again,” and a few of the students laugh, though most of them are too busy scribbling down the four words she’s written on the blackboard to notice that she’s said anything.