There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (45 page)

“Why then?”

“Anger management, I guess you could say. If I don’t work out regularly, I begin to get irritable. Lifting weights and pounding the heavy-bag helps me sort out all that stuff. It’s hard to be pissed when you’re pooped. Would you like to join us sometime? Gnat used to, but he had to quit when he actually started to get smaller.”

Tubby shook his head. “I couldn’t impose on ya’ll like that. I’m sure you and Josie would rather be alone.”

Bud opened the squeaking gate and paused at the entrance. “Hey, man, we’re working out, not
making
out! We’d love to have the company. You’ve got to get over this idea you’re busting up our party. We voted you in yesterday. Remember? You’re one of us now!”

“Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble,” said Tubby, quoting the movie
Freaks
from last night.

“One of us! One of us!” Bud finished, laughing.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”

“What? You mean all that dream stuff I was going on and on about yesterday?”

“Yeah. You said I was the…
Fourth
?”

Bud wondered how much he should tell his new friend. If Tubby knew the extent of his nightmares…well, he probably wouldn’t hang around until the end. And Bud didn’t think Ralph could survive the coming dark days without their help—or maybe it was the other way around. “They’re just dreams, and you’re in them. That’s all.”

“As one of the guys?”

Bud smiled, understanding what that might mean to someone like Ralph Tolson. “As one of the guys.”

           “Gee. Thanks, Buddy boy.”

“Sure thing. Now c’mon. Let me show you something,” he said, leading Tubby into the tidy cemetery. It was a communal effort that most folks on Moon had at one time or another volunteered. Tubby scoped out the park-like setting. Flowerbeds and peach blossoms on a gently sloping lawn. Flowering dogwoods and weeping willows bordering a contemplation pond. Benches, here and there. It was nothing like the wax museum’s idea of a graveyard!  Actually, there were very few graves on the large parcel of land. Because the community was so young, Tubby assumed. “Over there is where Rusty’s grandparents are buried. They started this town, you know.”

“Yeah, Josie told me last night.”

“And here’s where Joe’s dad is buried. Well, not really…since he was lost at sea. Except for some flowers and mementos, the casket is empty. Her grandparents, who lived on the island back in Jessie’s day, died before Josie was born. They were cremated and had their ashes spread, out there on the sound. Fitting, when you think about it.”

“How so?”

Bud pointed in the general direction of Moon River. “Because that’s where their son came to rest years later…out there on the river.”

They stopped in front of a marble memorial, a shrimpboat sailing off into a sunset, etched above an engraving. Daisies, just beginning to wilt, filled a vase set into the marker. The boys stared at the headstone in silence.

                            
 
Joseph
Rusty
O’Hara

        Born March 11
th
, 1959

      Lost at sea Oct 13
th
, 199
6
 

                                      
But when ye come and all the flowers are dying

             
                                            And I am dead, as dead I well may be,

             
                                              Go out and find the place where I am lying,

             
                                            And kneel and say an Ave there for me…

                                                       
“He died the same night as your mother, huh?”

“Josie and Rusty tell you about that, too?”

Tubby nodded, hoping he hadn’t hurt Bud in some thoughtless way.

“Good. I don’t like talking about it much. My mom’s resting over there.” Bud pointed at the corner of the lot, where a granite angel stood all by her lonesome, her arms and face raised in supplication to the heavens above. A stately oak provided shade for a marble bench beside the grave. “If you don’t mind, I’ll meet you back at the gate.”

Tubby walked back to the entrance and looked through the bars to see Bud on his knees by his mother’s grave. He felt something wet on his cheek and reached up to touch it, thinking it might be rain. He looked at his moist fingertips in surprise.
Now when did I start crying?

   
                            *******

Rusty and Joel were playing War with a pack of cards they’d found behind the counter when Josie came out of the box-office. Joel was sipping a Cherry Coke and having himself a high old time. Josie hated to break up the party but she needed to speak with Rusty alone.

“Tell me again why we bothered opening today?” Rusty asked her.

“Because Bud asked us to,” Josie said. “Hey, Freckle Butt. Do me a solid, will ya?”

Joel gave his sister a measured look. “Depends.”

“I’m a little chilly. Go up to the clubhouse and get me jacket.” She gave Joel her key to the door.

“Sure thing!” Joel was thrilled to have a reason to go up to the clubhouse. Josie didn’t allow him up there very often. He slid off the counter and took off running. Rusty watched him until he was down the hall and out of sight.

“Real subtle, Joe. Now, seeing as how it ain’t a bit cold in here, what was that all about?”

“Your dad called.”

“Yeah? So?”

“He said for us to steer clear of the Pines.”

             
“Okayyy. That sounds ominous. What’s up, Red?”

“He said the sheriff found a dead body out in the Pines this morning. A dead
man’s
body.”

             
Rusty’s eyes began to blink rapidly. “You’re   kidding, right? Please tell me you’re kidding!”

Josie shook her head, her green eyes brimming with tears. “He said it was one of those men from the Center. Said the guy supposedly went AWOL the other day.”

“Oh, God, Red. How’d he die?”

“He was shot, Rusty. Shot right between the eyes.”

                            *******

Tubby had his back against the brick wall when Bud exited the cemetery. Bud’s head was down, his hands tucked into the pockets of his shorts, his face somber and still. Tubby got up and collected his friend’s T-shirt from across the fence in a reverent fashion. He handed Bud the shirt, and watched him pull it over his head, trying to think of something comforting to say, but no words came to mind.

Bud led the way around the cemetery, heading once more towards the woods behind it. “Sorry for the stop. I can’t pass this way without saying hi to my mom first.”

“Sure, Bud. I understand.”

That was a darn lie, and Tubby knew it. Stopping by Mom’s grave to say hi? No sir, he didn’t understand that at all! The thought of never being able to watch TV again with his mom made him want to run home and make sure she was still there. The way she lost control, laughing hysterically at the sitcoms. Tears squirting out of her squinched up eyes. Her plump hands waving in the air. The way she kissed his forehead
every
single
night
to see if he was running a fever. The look of pride in her big hazel eyes whenever he did the least little thing in school or at home. As if he was the best son a mother ever had.

Lordy, what would the world be like without her? Would it still even turn? Heck, would I even want it to?

             
He also couldn’t help the morbid imagery running through his head. He wondered if they’d re-attached Mrs. Brown’s head somehow to her neck. Or if the mortician had simply laid it in the coffin. Where it might have rolled around during the interment process:
Rumble, rumble, Thud! Rumble, rumble, Thud!
Jeepers!

What a creepshow his mind sometimes was. The unwelcome movie made him shiver in the heat. He wondered if he was a sick-o for imagining such a thing.

Bud interrupted his friend’s morbid train of thought. “Let’s keep a zipped lip here on out, Tubby. No telling where the owner of that SUV is. Not for nothin’, man, I don’t suggest you come out this way by yourself.”

The warning made Ralph curious. “How come, Bud? Is it haunted?” Tubby felt like slapping his forehead and going
Doohh!
What an insensitive thing to say!

If Bud was offended, he didn’t show it. “The Noonans’ live close by, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Tubby responded mildly. His eyes roamed the woods in search of what he imagined was a cruel sort of house. A sinister abode, fit only for the vicious Noonans. Like that weird farmhouse in
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

Halfway through the clearing Tubby saw that the road went no further into the Pines. In fact, there was no trail at all leading back into the woods, just a seemingly impenetrable wall of scrub trees and thickets.

Bud didn’t hesitate, but dove straight into the dense hedgerow. Tubby struggled behind in the bushes and briars, glad now for his blue jeans and sweat shirt.

             
“Stay close,” Bud said over his shoulder. “There are a lot of sinkholes in this part of the Pines.”

Tubby gulped. He looked nervously about, but the undergrowth was too thick to see very far in any direction. His attention elsewhere, Tubby ran into Bud, standing still as a Greek statue. “Gee, Bud. What’s—”

“Shhh!”
Bud hissed, pointing straight ahead at something. Try as he may, Tubby couldn’t see a thing out of the ordinary. Suddenly a dark image removed itself from the middle branches of a pine tree. Tubby’s first reaction when he saw the chimpanzee was to smile.

His next was to scream…

                            *******

Rusty could barely process the news Josie had just told him. He took a deep breath and tried to think clearly. “Do you suppose that’s who Buddy boy shot last night?”

Josie looked over at the hallway for her brother’s return. She turned to Rusty and nodded.

“I thought you said it was an animal! You said it growled just like a damn dog!”

“We also told you it stood about six-feet tall. Keep your voice down. I don’t want Joel hearing any of this.”

Rusty put a hand to his forehead.
This can’t be happening!
Had Bud actually
killed
someone? “All right, all right. But you can’t know this for certain, Joe. I mean, you and Bud both said you couldn’t see a thing, right? It was too damn dark! It could have been anything!”

Josie shook her head. “I want to believe that, I really do, but the facts—”

“What facts?”
Rusty said, hysterical now.

Josie led her overwrought friend to the box-office and closed the door behind them. “For one thing, your dad said they found the body just off the Oyster Trail, not fifty yards from the road. That’s pretty much where we saw the thing, where Bud took a shot at it. Secondly, there’s the bullet hole right between the guy’s eyes. Right where Bud was aiming.”

Rusty put a hand to his mouth. “Oh, shit. From the same gun…”

“That’s right. The .38 he’s carrying
right
now
.”

             
              *******

“Shut up, Tubby!”
Bud growled. Ralph was so terrified he was squealing like a pig with its foot in a trap. Bud elbowed him in the gut, knocking the wind from his lungs.

             
The ape, a fully mature female, stared back at them from her roost in the pine, some thirty yards away and twenty feet up the tree. It was easy to define as female because of the inflamed genitalia between the animal’s legs. And if the red-rimmed eyes weren’t enough to clue them in to the ape’s condition, then the bloody foam drooling from her chattering fangs surely was. A trail of the stuff, dripping from the branches of the trees, plainly marked her arboreal journey. At some point, the ape had bitten off half her tongue. Blood flowed from either side of her jaws, blending into the copious drool, oozing nonstop out of her mouth. The chimp’s right arm hung useless at her side, the bones in the forearm glistening through the tattered remnants of flesh and muscle. Flies buzzed in and out of this necrotic mess, laying their eggs in the dead meat. Bud caught a whiff of the decomposition, and wondered what was keeping the poor creature alive. While the gray bitch had been frightening enough, there was something altogether worse with a primate in the same condition. An evil barely perceptible in the canine seemed to envelop the distant cousin above them.

The ape smiled at the two boys
. She actually smiled!
Not some kind of mimic grin, either, which Bud knew apes were capable of doing. No, this was a wicked sort of smile. A lascivious smirk that made him blush right down to his roots. Of lesser note, she also had the shakes. Just like the Gray from the day before. Her head shimmied on top of her hairy shoulders, like a bobble head doll on the dash of a rolling semi. The dripping of the foam, splattering on the ground beneath the ape, began to grate on Bud’s nerves. He couldn’t abide that fucking sound. He didn’t even consider running; in this tangled environment the ape was purely in her element. Even with the one useless arm. A chimp in its prime could rip the limbs from a grown man’s body. Like their close encounter with the gray bitch, their only hope was in killing it.