There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (56 page)

“
Forty
minutes? That seems kinda long, Dad. South Side beach is only a stones throw from here.”

“He claimed to have been delayed, Bud, but I didn’t believe him. Didn’t push him on it either, I’m sorry to say. I was just so happy to see you again! Moon’s only twelve miles wide, though. It doesn’t take forty minutes to get from one end of the island to the other. Not in a car, it doesn’t. Then again…”

“Then again?”

“Then again, it might take that long if he was coming from the Army Base. Where he’d had you quarantined all along…”

                            *******             

Getting ready for church, Josie noticed Shayna hadn’t come home yet. It was her mother’s habit to come in on the six a.m. ferry and spend the remainder of Sunday in bed, snoring the sun away.

              Shayna’s bed was still empty, though.

             
Josie sighed in relief. She wasn’t worried about her mom. Like a bad penny, Shayna always turned up. Besides, it was nice not to have to tend to that woman’s needs for a change. She went to Joel’s room and shook her brother awake. “Wakey, wakey. Eggs and baccy.”

Ever since her father died, she and Joel had regularly attended church with the Huggins’s. She found it comforting to be in a spiritual place; it made her feel a little closer to her dad on those days, who himself was a spiritual, though not religious man.

Besides, she had some extra prayers to tender today.

Deep down, she knew that she and Bud had done nothing wrong. So why did she feel so guilty? So confused? She sighed.
Och! That damn train…it just keeps right on rolling, doesn’t it?

She slid into a pale yellow summer dress, which was most definitely out of season; her only other choice, though, had been the pleated skirt she’d worn the night before, and that didn’t seem right somehow. She stepped into her mother’s white sandals and frowned at her dated look in the mirror. She could’ve bought more things for herself, but then what would Joel have done for food and clothes? As it was, she was fortunate to be able to do even that much. She had the best babysitting gig on Moon. The Portmans’, who owned one of the nicest homes in Reva Heights, paid her a salary of a hundred dollars a week, usually for just being on call! Their twin, four-year-old girls were a handful, though, and Josie eventually earned every penny of that weekly C-note. Even so, they rarely used her services more than twice a week. Tonight was such a night. Josie hoped she could talk Bud into staying over with her. She knew Mrs. Portman wouldn’t mind.

As usual, Joel was slow to get ready. She brushed his unruly mop-top, helped him with his tie, and then hurried him out the front door. She was surprised that the Huggins’s weren’t waiting outside for them in Betty Anne’s Chevy Yukon. It sat empty behind their cabin, right beside Ham’s old Ford pick ‘em-up truck.

             
“Maybe they’re not going to church today,” Joel said hopefully. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.

“Well, even if they’re not,
we
are,” Josie said.

“You mean, walk all that way to church in these hot old clothes? Have you gone crazy?”

“Hush up. Let’s go see if they’re running late. They probably got tired of having to wait for us every Sunday.”

They climbed the brick steps, onto the wide porch, and walked up to the screen door. Ham, Betty Anne, and Rusty were all huddled around the big screen TV in the living room. Josie pushed the screen door open. “Aye? Aren’t you heathens going to church today?”

Betty Anne jumped at the sound of Josie’s voice. She checked her watch. “Lord have mercy! Look at the time, Ham! Service starts in five minutes!”

“Hey, Joe. Joel,” Rusty greeted them from the couch. Ham barely acknowledged Josie or his wife—such was his focus on the Weather Channel.

“Come
on,
baby,” Betty Anne said, tugging on her husband’s beefy arm. Ham reluctantly got up and turned off the TV. “That storm isn’t likely to get here before church is over. You can watch the doomsayers when we get home.”

             
“Storm?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Rusty asked, walking out the door. “That tropical storm is now a force four hurricane. And it looks to be headed this way!”

“Jack, they’re calling it,” Betty Anne chortled cheerfully. “Hurricane Jack the Ripper. Since it’s so close to Halloween and all. Now, isn’t that clever?”

Ham looked crossly at his wife from across the rooftop of the SUV. “Don’t know what you’re so giddy about,” he snapped. “By the time Jack gets here it could be a category
five
storm! Woman, do you know what a hurricane that
mean
would do to little old Moon?”

“God’s will,” she said, opening her car door. Rusty looked over at Josie in the back seat and rolled his eyes. It had always been one of his mother’s peculiarities to behave as if nothing was wrong, when things seemed at their darkest. A trait that often got on his father’s nerves.

                            *******             

Tubby was sitting by himself in the back of the church when the Huggins’s, Josie, and Joel hurriedly passed him by. The first hymn had already begun.

             
“Pssst! Rusty!”
he hissed under the cover of his hymnal. His parents were sitting up front. Tubby had begged off, hoping to sit with his friends.

Rusty turned and pulled Josie back to the last pew, where Tubby had saved them each a seat. Josie looked even better today than she had last night, which was really saying something. It was weird seeing his friends without their ubiquitous army coats. Josie’s yellow summer dress made her golden skin glow. It was all Tubby could do to wipe the lovesick look from his face.

“Hey, Joe,” he said, trying out her pet name for himself. It felt good to call a pretty girl by such a familiarality.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll even call her Big Red!
The idea of calling her “Tits”, like Rusty did, made Ralph feel faint. He checked his clip-on-tie to make sure it hadn’t slipped. “Rusty. Joel. What’s up, fellows?” Miss Beasly turned around in the pew in front of them and gave Tubby a withering look. He grinned sheepishly.
” Sorry, ma’am.”

As Josie squeezed by she patted Ralph on his head, making him feel as if the Pope had just blessed him.

“Where am I supposed to sit?” Joel whined.

Miss Beasly turned around to glare at them again.

“Sit on me lap and hush up,” Josie said.

As the collection plates passed down their pew, Tubby leaned towards Josie.
“Where’s Bud?”

“Buddy boy doesn’t go to church,” Joel said importantly. “He don’t believe in—”

“
Shhhh
,” said Josie, squeezing Joel’s knee. This was the last place she wanted Bud’s lack of faith publicly broadcast. It was the only major point she and Bud differed on, and one that troubled her greatly. If anyone needed God in his corner, it was that big blockhead up the street.

Tubby managed to keep quite the rest of the service, content in just being close to the woman he adored. Josie’s bare knee leaned companionably against his leg, and Tubby spent the rest of the next hour reveling in that casual touch. He realized he was still grinning when Joel looked at him from atop the perch on his sister’s lap.

Tubby crossed his eyeballs, and the two boys got the giggles. Josie shot an elbow to Tubby’s chest and pinched Joel’s leg, and that put an end to that.

             
Tubby enjoyed having Rusty spend the night, the two of them talking well into the wee hours. Rusty surprised him by admitting that unlike Josie and Ralph, his favorite author wasn’t Stephen King! While he enjoyed the King’s work, Rusty’s author of choice was George Pelecanos, a writer who specialized in urban crime fiction. “I just really dig his ghetto prose,” he’d said, when pressed for a reason why. “The man writes like Tarantino directs.” Even more surprising was the fact that Bud Brown’s favorite writer was Pat Conroy. A Low Country legend, who lived on another nearby island off the Beaufort coast.

             
Rusty said Bud had a poetic soul that fit right in with Conroy’s introspective style of writing.

             
“Yeah, man,” Rusty had quipped, “we might b
e
Creep
s
, but we’re some
well-rounded
Creep
s
!
” They discussed the things that mattered most to them, how Tubby yearned to be a writer, and how Rusty couldn’t stop thinking about the movies. Then there were the little things that didn’t matter at all. The odds and ends of their obsessions that intrigued them so. That was the best, Tubby decided, as he listened to the preacher drone on and on at the front of the church. To shoot the breeze on stupid stuff that didn’t make a lick of difference in this old world. Reminisces of Halloweens past, and what they wore those nights. Favorite episodes of
The Twilight Zone
and
The Outer Limits
.
Best theme songs ever (Tubby loved the instrumental from
Hawaii 5-O.
Rusty grooved on that finger-snapping ditty from
The Adams Family
). The coolest movie monsters (their consensus: the 1931
Frankenstein
, the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, and the alien, from
Alien
). The best smells in the world outside a kitchen had also been a topic:
Old comic books. Freshly cut grass. Bubblicious Watermelon gum.
Real
Christmas trees. Movie theater popcorn. And burning leaves in the fall.

             
Tubby had almost included the scent of strawberries, but wisely kept that telling-tidbit to himself.

             
As it was his first participation in the act of chitchatting, it had been especially hard for Tubby to stop carrying on about a whole lot of nothing. His head was full of random thoughts and opinions he wanted to express and share. Eventually, though, Rusty had fallen asleep on him, and Tubby felt compelled to try and do the same. By the time he’d drifted off, he’d learned another useless fact: it’s impossible to fall asleep with a grin on your face.

             
At the end of the service, they got an unexpected shock. The Reverend Milo Tipple—an industrious black minister, who lived in Beaufort, and made a daily trip over to the island on the ferry—told the congregation that Dr. Clint Bidwell had a few words he’d like to say to them before they departed.

             
“This won’t take long,” Clint Bidwell said, smiling down at the citizens of Moon. Like Ham Huggins, most Mooners revered Dr. Bidwell. He was a distinguished looking man, a lean six-foot-one, with a head full of salt-and-pepper hair, which the single women (and some married one’s as well, if the rumors were true) couldn’t get enough of. When Dr. Bidwell spoke, the residents of Moon perked up and listened.

             
“I know you’re all ready to get to lunch, and you shrimpers anxious to get back to your Weather Channels.” At this, the wives all tittered, even if Ham and most of the other fishermen didn’t quite see the humor. “But I’m afraid we have another potential problem, which may be even more serious than Hurricane Jack. Our good neighbors at the Research Center have reported to me the presence of rabies on our fair rock.”

             
There was a good deal of murmuring over this news. Bidwell held up his hands in a calming nature. The whole church stilled as if Moses himself had just commanded them to do so. “Now, now…there’s no reason to panic just yet,” Bidwell clucked. His unusually long teeth gleamed wetly in the sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows. “Our friends at the Center have assured me they’ve nipped this thing in the bud. However, we can’t be too careful, now can we? I think it’s wise to consider that rabies could
potentially
spread fast and furious on an island this size.”

             
“Does this have something to do with that body they found yesterday in the Pines?” Mr. Wilky asked from the middle of the church. News of the deceased man had spread like wildfire. Rumors were varied and rampant.

             
“As a matter of fact, it does,” Bidwell admitted.

This completely caught Tubby and his friends off guard. More murmurs all around them, louder this time.

             
“Did the Center have anything to do with this virus?” asked Ham Huggins, standing up from his seat at the front. All murmurs ceased and all eyes fixed on Ham.

             
Josie saw that Ham's query had taken Bidwell aback. He clucked nervously. “Goodness, no! The Research Center does do
some
animal testing. However, I assure you, its all fairly innocuous stuff. I only meant to say—”

             
“How do you know all this, Clint?” Ham asked. “Are you their spokesman now?”     

Rusty smiled proudly at his father’s broad back. He hadn’t told any of this stuff to his old man. It was their hope the whole matter would simply go away—yet despite his father’s folksy manner, Ham was one smart shrimper. He’d obviously put some things together on his own.