Dwelling (13 page)

“I wonder if ISIS had not engaged in extremism, in barbarianism, if our position would be different. But yes, it’s an interesting parallel, isn’t it? Just look at what happened during the last days of Vietnam. We scorched that country. Thousands upon thousands died and for what? What was accomplished? Was the price worth it? And now, here we are, facing something very similar and wondering the very same things. Is it worth it?”
The man did not budge from his seat. He remained fixed, all but for a faint smirk squirming across his lips.

“Shut the fuck up,” Johnathan hissed and then turned off the TV.

***

Downstairs, breakfast was long over. But, thankfully, a row of heated urns still contained some coffee inside. Johnathan pressed the lever and filled a to-go cup, courtesy of Capital Hill Hotel. He checked his phone.
About two hours before I need to be there
. He found a lonesome seat near the lounge and dialed Karen. The phone rang twice.

“Hey, mister, why didn’t you call when you landed?” Karen’s voice was full of concern and perhaps a little hurt.

“Sorry, babe. Jet lag. Must have slipped my mind,” Johnathan said, unconvincingly.

“You sound a little rough.”

What are you trying to say?

“Rough night. Always hard sleeping somewhere new.” Johnathan cleared his throat.

“Okay.”

There was a long and uncomfortable silence. Johnathan sipped his coffee.

“So…” Karen started, “all ready for your big speech?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

Silence.

“You doing all right?” she probed, her concern as irritating as ever.

Johnathan rolled his eyes.

No, Karen, I’m not. I drank an elephant’s portion of scotch last night. Fancied overdosing off my meds, you know the ones that are supposed to keep me sane and functioning, except all they do is send me on cloud nine or drag me into the gutter. And I’m pretty sure I am going crazy.

Saw Ricky at the airport. Yup, my dead friend Ricky. Real
Night of the Living Dead
type shit. Oh and he was kind of upset with me—not that I blame the guy or anything. I was the one who was supposed to have his back. Seeing…whatever it was…when I should have seen that raghead with the RPG. But hey, who’s taking score, right? Oh, and the kicker, not only am I hungover, but just about every morning I can feel my toes wiggling, and—for just a moment—for a moment it feels as if my leg is really there, even though I know it’s not. And it pisses me off to no end.

Ricky’s dead and I’m a
freak
. Do you know how I know I’m a freak? Well, just ask the nice lady who brought me my food last night. Ask that girl just what the fuck she was staring at? Huh? Take a fucking picture you bitch, it’d last longer! I should have told her that, but hey, I don’t mean to get upset. Got me one nice hangover to deal with this morning while I drive over to the VA, limp on stage, and blab on and on about mental health, and positive thinking, and moving beyond our disabilities. You know, hero bullshit type stuff, right? So—yeah, to answer your question, I’m doing just fine and dandy. Tip-top.

“How’s Tabitha?” Johnathan asked.

There was another long and miserable pause. And then the conversation shifted to the business-as-usual talk. Tabitha was doing well. High marks in class. Missed daddy, of course. Daddy missed the hell out of her, too. He missed his little sunshine. And daddy missed mommy too. Despite everything, Johnathan knew he was one lucky son-of-a-bitch.
She deals with a lot; it can’t be easy married to me and all my crap. Maybe she’d be better off without having to deal with my drama.
Johnathan pushed the thought away. They ended their phone call with the typical
‘I love you's.’

Johnathan went out the glass door. Found his SUV and drove off toward the VA D.C. medical center.

CHAPTER 13

LUNA’S SPARK

Bobby

Bobby woke on the miserable, cold muddy ground. Bright beams of light broke through the forest clearing above him. Below, a lazy cloud of fog hung over him, covering his naked bloody body.

“Balls in heaven,” Bobby wheezed. His body ached from every slight movement. His head pounded as if Dave Grohl was burrowed somewhere deep, hammering away on a pair of tom-toms rhythmically to some nightmarish version of
Aneurysm
. Licking a patch of dew, Bobby turned his neck. Cobain screeched in his wistful, hoarse voice, while Novoselic thundered along with a heart-thumping bass solo.
I hate the morning after…

Bobby curled into a ball, shivering on the ground when a sweet, merciful warmth fell over him. He suddenly realized he was being covered with a blanket.

Luna!

“Morning, handsome,” called Luna standing above him. The gate was open. She had on one of her typical flower-pattern long skirts. Her brown nipples were visible through her light-colored tank top.

“Bit nippily out, ain’t it?” said Bobby, cocking a grin as fierce as his headache.

Luna looked at herself. “Little bit,” she smiled, unabashed “Why don’t you come inside and take a shower. Wash off that mud and blood and have some of my special brew.”

Bobby agreed, grimacing as Luna helped him to his feet. Every bone felt warped and tenuous. “What? No foo-foo tea this morning?” he chuckled painfully.

“Hey! You be nice and I might even cook you up some bacon to go with that lead octane.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Luna smiled warmly and started toward her country home. Bobby followed suit. Curious, he turned back and gazed at the batting cage, his cage. Tracks covered the entire ground inside. But that’s not what really disturbed Bobby. What disturbed Bobby were the sinkholes carved in the ground, as if something was trying to dig its way out.

Luna’s hand was on his blanket covered shoulder.

Bobby jumped.

“Easy—” she hummed. Her gaze followed his own to the cage. “Let’s worry about that later. For now, we need to get you cleaned up and fed. Okay?”

“I was—it was digging, wasn’t it? It’s looking for a way out, right?” Bobby asked, his face flushed and pale white.

“Perhaps. I don’t typically watch the wolf. My presence seems to…irritate your other half. So, I keep to the house ’til morning.” Her eyes fell from Bobby to the crude shallow trenches in the cage’s mud caked floor.

Bobby watched her now.
If the beast had dug a few feet more…
he thought. “This isn’t going to work, is it?” He was hardly able to mask the terror in his voice.
What if I got out? What if it got into the house with Luna? What if
—

“Hush. We don’t know that, so let’s not dwell on it, or at least not until you shower and get something warm in your stomach. Okay?” Luna dragged Bobby by the arm toward the house.

Disheartened, he relented and followed her up the path to the house Luna’s grandfather left to her in his will. The air was agonizingly cheerful. Birds chirped high in an oak. The lull of passing traffic was nonexistent. The smell of a patch of late bloomed bluebonnets was strong and flavorful. Even the house looked bright and sunny. Nothing at all what Bobby was feeling internally. Fear of the thing inside him—the dark and dangerous part of himself stormed and raged like a schooner caught in a hurricane.

Bobby sipped his coffee remembering his first
morning after
at Luna’s. There had been so much to ask. For starters, why this stranger, this not-so-young woman took him in, for even just once a month, because she knew, she knew and still she welcomed him. That thought brought Bobby to his second question. How did she know about his—condition? Or maybe even more importantly, and equally bizarre, why was she so
cool
with it? Well, maybe
cool
was a queer word to use in such a situation, but yet it remains the same. She was
cool
with his condition, his once a month wolf-like transfigurations, and not just that but she seemed to have some sort of prior knowledge about it, or an understanding of it, in the very least.

Yes, this Luna woman was an odd bird, to be sure. Her story was difficult to unravel. She had mentioned her grandmother, seldom. But her grandfather, she had spoken of him on more than one occasion. How he died from—
what was it? A heart attack, I think
. Anyways, the story about her parents, on the other hand, now that took a little more warming to get to.

As the story goes, or as much as Luna was willing to share, her parents were both loving and caring. Protective, to a fault. They worried about stewardship. Paid little attention to politics. Laughed and loved. Danced under the moon. Loved by all. They were, as the saying goes,
free-spirited
. One night, while Luna was having a sleepover with one of her girlfriends she had a terrible nightmare. In it, she watched her folks driving down the highway in their Audi. She watched as some mystic observer, unable to warn or change the course of events, as an eighteen-wheeler plowed into them. The driver had fallen asleep on a long haul, or so she had dreamed. In her dream she could hear them screaming in the fire that consumed the car.

She woke up panicked and crying. The mother of the girlfriend called her parents, concerned. But when the doorbell rang, it was her grandfather standing on the stoop. His face frighteningly disfigured with shame and grief.
“He was so very grey looking,”
Luna had said. Her grandfather took her by the hand to his truck. There, he told her everything and held her as she wept.

Luna said her grandfather stood by her through it all. The wake. The funeral. All the damn questions from curiously concerned neighbors and distant relatives bringing baked tuna casseroles in Tupperware dishes that would have to be washed and returned to sender. Her grandfather held her hand through it all. He raised her and loved her the best he knew how. He was a good man, of that Bobby had little doubt.
The best never seem to last long in this world
, he thought, and strangely the face of his friend Ricky came to mind.

“Okay, Fido. How many pieces of bacon do you want?” asked Luna, shooing away the silence with her spatula.

“Fido?” asked Bobby, his mocked look of hurt partially concealed beneath his scruffy beard.

“What? Not a good nickname?”

“I wouldn’t romanticize it.” His grin was flimsy at best.

“Okay, so maybe not Fido.
Wolfman
seems a tad—
Hollywood
. What would you suggest?” she asked, her back turned to him now, flipping a piece of bacon into a paper towel on the counter. Grease spattered on the tile. The earthy aroma of pork filled the kitchen pleasantly.

“How about…” his eyes turned dark, “monster.
Freak
, or, I know, how about,
The Devil of Hitchcock
, huh? Has a nice ring to it.” He sipped his coffee, unamused with himself.

Luna stopped and turned to him. “It’s not like that, Bobby, and you know it.”

“Then what is it then? Huh?”

“We talked about this, Bobby. Remember?”

“All you said was something about your grandmother.
Rougarou
or whatever.” Bobby looked into his mug. “Supernatural in the natural world or some mumbo-jumbo.”

“This is something you can control. Don’t let it control you.” She flipped another piece of bacon.

“What does that even mean, Luna?”

“Treat it like an illness. It’ll never go away. This is with you forever—as far as I know. I mean, have heard.”

“You know something, don’t you? You’ve seen this before? Someone close to you? Is there a cure? A way to make it stop?” Bobby couldn’t hide his desperation.

Luna stopped messing with the bacon. Still and silent. Contemplating, perhaps a memory of another time and place.

Bobby sat on the edge of his seat overcome with a new gleam of hope, the first since Luna showed him the cage.

“It wouldn’t help,” she said quietly.

“What? Tell me, please.”

“
Lanmò
.”

“Huh?”

“It’s Haitian.”

“For?”

“Death.”

“I’d have to die? That’s my big winning ticket to freedom?” Bobby slumped back onto the stool.

“It’s a type of death, but yes, death nonetheless. My Nana told me a story once about a man in Mississippi. Legend, mostly.”

“He was…what? Brought back?”

“In a way.”

“Great.”

Luna said no more. She finished cooking the bacon and piled it high on a flower-printed, ceramic plate. She placed the mound of pork on the table in front of him, refilled his mug with coffee, and joined him on the opposite side.

So, if I want this to end, all I have to do is kill myself—great, just fucking fantastic
. He snatched a thick cut of bacon and sipped on his drink. The pork was deviously salty. The coffee bold, reminding him of the coffee his old platoon Sergeant used to make in the field.
What was his name? Can’t remember. But that son-of-a-bitch used to make pure syrup.
Bobby grinned at the sudden memory.

“What’s so funny?” asked Luna, naturally curious.

“Nothing really, just remembering something. Not important.” Bobby took another piece of bacon and devoured it.

“You need to do that more often,” said Luna. She wasn’t touching the bacon. Both hands were clasped around her own mug. A sketch of an old mission style church with the words
Café Du Monde
: Original French Market Coffee Stand New Orleans, printed on the white ceramic.

“What, eat more bacon?” asked Bobby.

“No,
fur ball
. Laugh. You need to laugh more. It’s good for the soul, you know.” She smiled at him.

Bobby smiled back. Despite himself, despite his, as Luna called it,
illness
, or how he himself called it,
his monster within
, he smiled. He smiled despite knowing, feeling the
illness
, the
monster
within, the
rougarou
, was still there. He smiled, even while knowing those yellow eyes were looking at him in the darker places of himself he was too terrified to look. The place where he could smell shame and guilt and remorse and hear the rattling of AK47s and M16A4s and men shouting bloody murder and the frighteningly familiar booming thud of a finely placed IED ringing against his ears, blinding him in a flash charge, and thinking, wondering what had just happened, and in what can only be described as if time itself had slowed to a painful drum beat, a chilling rationalization dawned.

In this dark place, he had wondered more than once,
Am I alive?
And then the ringing fades and the dust settles, but his heart remains pumping hard inside his chest so much so that if an
Alien
tore its way out he wouldn’t be surprised and then, finally, all he wanted to do was scream…scream until puke filled his lungs like black creamy butter. Yes, those heartless, bestial yellow eyes that smelled of cruelty were still there watching him watch himself, knowing full well there was nothing Bobby could do to stop it, no place to run that it wouldn’t find him, and knowing that Bobby was too much of a coward to take his own life. It knew. So the yellow eyes would wait, biding its time until the next full moon. And despite all this, Bobby Weeks smiled because Luna made him happy.

***

Luna

They ate for some time without saying a word. Her smile lingered while Bobby’s faded away. Luna could tell that some memory had surfaced in his glazed-over look as he slurped on his coffee and chewed his bacon. He reminded her of her grandfather, as her grandfather shared a story about his time in
Iwo Jima
. If she touched him, maybe she could see what
he
saw.
But do I even want to see?
Bobby was cold and stoic. Whatever the memory was, it wasn’t a pleasant one.

“Earth to Bobby,” sang Luna, standing up, collecting the now empty plate.

“Huh?” Bobby asked, stunned into consciousness. He looked at the crumb-ridden plate in her hand, “I thought you hippies didn’t eat meat?” he asked.

“We don’t.”

“You mean to tell me I ate that entire pile of bacon? Holy
Toledo
! That’s some kind of record, right?”

“It was quite impressive,” Luna said, smiling with her back turned, placing the plate into the sink.

“Sorry—I didn’t mean to—”