Red Moon (9 page)

C
HASE REMEMBERS
the first time he talked to Augustus. Seventh grade, Obsidian Junior High, after gym class, he walks into the locker room. Showers sizzle. Steam fills the air. Boys are scrubbing their armpits with soap or toweling off in front of their open lockers. He spins his combo and pauses before yanking the lock—because of the voices he hears, jeering, laughing like jackals.

Three boys—still in their shorts and tank tops—stand outside a toilet stall and kick at the door hard enough to dent the thin sheet metal. “Come on,” they say. “Come out and show us your pussy.” Another kick and the door jars open.

Chase recognizes the kid inside. They’re in the same section of math, and the other day, in line at the cafeteria, a girl wearing bell-bottoms and her hair pulled back in a ponytail turned to the kid, who had accidentally rubbed up against her, and said, “Don’t touch me. You haven’t even gone through puberty yet.”

He wears small glasses on a head too big for his body. His hair is the wispy blond of cornsilk. His arms and legs are stumpy, his torso round. All of this giving him the appearance of an enormous baby.

The same can’t be said of Chase, who feels so much younger than his body. A few years ago his bones began to ache and he developed a vicious hunger, gobbling up six eggs for breakfast, a whole pizza for dinner, sucking down five gallons of milk every week. He studied himself often in the mirror, as his limbs stretched to match his oversize feet, his hands, what his mother called puppy paws. He started rubbing himself off in fifth grade, shaving in sixth grade with his father’s razor and Barbasol. He is taller than most of his teachers and plays forward on the varsity basketball team.

He’s not a good guy—he knows that has nothing to do with what happens next. He hates the Methodist church his parents drag him to every Sunday and smokes cigarettes under the football bleachers and sneaks cheat sheets into exams and every chance he gets tries to slide his hand up a girl’s skirt. But most of his trespasses have to do with pleasure, seeking it out, the buzz of a beer, the way a blow job makes his whole body feel like a tingly nerve ending.

He’s not a bad guy either—he has a certain sense of righteousness motivated now by these three punks, with their braces and pimply backs, getting off on ganging up on somebody weaker than them.

From what Chase gathers, as he moves toward them, the kid has been camping out in the toilet stall after gym, skipping his shower, changing where no one can observe him. A pile of clothes remains in the stall as he is dragged across the wet tile floor, half-dressed in a button-up short-sleeve and white briefs that match the paleness of his skin. He struggles but does not cry out when the boys reach for his underwear and try to yank it off him.

Chase comes up behind them. Without pause he kicks one of the boys square in the ass and sends him keeling into the wall—striking it with a wet thud, crumpling into a mewling ball. Chase cracks together the skulls of the other two boys and then shoves them headfirst into the nearby urinals. He holds them there for a good five seconds, mashing their mouths into the deodorant pucks. Then he slams the flush bars and leaves them sputtering.

The kid has gathered up his clothes. His face is impassive, and his glasses have fogged over, hiding his eyes. Neither of them says anything. Not until the next day, after algebra, when the kid introduces himself as Augustus and asks what he can do for Chase.

“You don’t owe me nothing.”

The rest of the class is filing out of the room, glancing at the strange pair, Augustus standing with his arms crossed and Chase sitting with his legs sprawled out, their height about equal. “I disagree,” the kid says. “And maybe you will as well when you hear my proposal.” The precision of the kid’s words, the confident purse of his mouth—the white short-sleeve shirt, like something an accountant would wear in the summer. Chase might as well be having a conversation with an alien. He has no idea how to respond and finds he doesn’t have to, because the kid is filling the silence, explaining how, if protected, Augustus will do any homework assignments Chase finds tiresome.

“I’m not stupid. And I’m not looking for help.” Chase is less angered than amused. “My grades are fine.”

“You have obligations I do not: sports and socializing. Homework gets in the way of these, yes? If you feel like completing your assignments on your own, great. But if on occasion you have an away game or a hot, sexy date—then you will hand the work off to me and I will happily oblige.”

“And for this I kick anybody’s ass who messes with you?”

A curt nod. “Tit for tat.”

Chase stands. He towers over the kid, could smash him into his backpack if he wanted. “We don’t have to hang out or anything, do we?”

“Not unless you want to.”

“I don’t.”

A contract they have more or less honored for the past thirty years.

Chase has never called Augustus by his name. It was a mouthful, and obnoxious, the name of some old poet who liked to write about the pansies growing in his garden. The kid. That’s what Chase called him—until they enrolled at the University of Oregon, when the kid took Chase aside during orientation and said he would rather not be called
that
anymore.

“Why not?”

“It implies a lack of strength.”

“Then what the hell am I supposed to call you?”

“My name.”

“Out of the question.”

He settled on Buffalo. For the enormous head, too big for any hat, that seems to grow directly out of his sloped shoulders. Chase nicknames everyone he meets. His administrative assistant, Moneypenny. His legal counsel, No Fun. The head of his security detail, Shrek, for his bald head, his jutting forehead, his barrel of a torso balanced on tiny legs. Even the people he doesn’t know, he finds a way to name them—a bartender is
honey
or
sugar
, a valet or groundskeeper is
buddy
or
friend
. It’s his way of making people come a little closer, look him in the eye and smile.

Sweetheart
is what he calls the woman working the front desk at the Kazumi Day Spa. He recognizes her from the teahouse. The wrinkled face and square body and silvery hair pulled back into a bun stabbed through with chopsticks. A potted bamboo sits in the corner. A scroll bearing a string of Japanese characters hangs behind her. She doesn’t smile at him but lifts her arm, gesturing to a dark hallway, and says, with a heavy accent, “Last door on the left.”

The spa is in southwest Salem—not too far from the teahouse—a nondescript windowless brick building tucked between a pawnshop and a moneylender, the street busy with rusted-out cars missing their mufflers.

In a back room, the recessed lighting gives off a dim orange glow. Music trembles—piped in through the overhead speakers—something acoustic, what Chase recognizes as the same instrument played at the teahouse, the koto, the plucked strings making him think of spiders’ legs dancing across a web. In the center of the room waits the massage table and against the wall squats a glass-doored, marbled-topped bureau, full of white downy towels, bottles of oil and lotion. On top of it, a plug-in fountain, water gurgling over colored stones.

Buffalo used to tell him not to come here. For a long time, his principal duty, as chief of staff, seemed to be telling Chase what not to do. Do not bad-mouth Weyerhaeuser. Do not make fun of the Trail Blazers. Do not curse during live press conferences. Do not get intoxicated at black-tie fund-raisers. Do not punch Ron
Wyden
. Do not tell the
Oregonian
that you think Nancy Pelosi is one smoking-hot old lady.

The attacks changed everything. “You realize,” Buffalo said, more than a month ago, when the planes came down, “that this is the best thing that could have possibly happened?” At the time they were at Mahonia Hall, the governor’s mansion, a place Chase never liked much. The pretention of it—Tudor-style, ballroom, wine cellar, surrounded by thorny rose gardens. Not to mention that ten thousand square feet can feel pretty lonely in the middle of the night, when the dreams come to him. Sometimes he wakes up gasping—believing he is still in the Republic, where he served two tours—his nose choked with the smell of cooking flesh, his eyes imagining clawed hands scrabbling out from beneath the bed like a pair of gray spiders. He has more than once brought the security guard a beer to split on the front steps at three a.m.

The afternoon of the attacks, he and Buffalo were sitting in wingback oxblood leather chairs, watching the flat-screen, flipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News. Same footage, different talking heads. Outside Denver, the wreckage smoldered in a wheat field. At PDX and Logan International, the planes were parked on the tarmac like giant white coffins.

A reporter interviewed a woman wearing a Looney Tunes sweatshirt and purple leggings. The tape at the bottom of the screen identified her as a family member of one of the passengers. “It’s the most horrible thing in the world,” she said, roughing away her tears with the remains of a tissue. “And it’s happening right here.”

The footage cut to Jeremy Saber, the leader of the Resistance movement, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. In a video he posted online, he sat at a desk in a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was a mess of curls—his face square and shadowed with whiskers—and his arms were sheathed with tattoos. He looked more like a barista or hip college instructor than the spokesperson for an extremist group. “Some will say we do not value human life. We value it very much. That is why we have taken it away. We do it with remorseful intention. You are paying attention now. That is what we need for you to do. Pay attention. Our demands have not been met.” He went on to list enforced medication and blood testing, limited employment opportunities, the U.S. occupation of the Republic, and the proposed construction of a public lycan database as chief among his complaints. “If the government does not respond to these very reasonable requests, we will be forced to be unreasonable again. The terror will continue.”

Buffalo stood then and tucked his hands in the pockets of his sport coat and walked over to the window, the gray light coming through the water-spotted glass reminding Chase of his Marine Corps woodland-pattern cammies.

“One way of looking at it is this,” Buffalo said. “As a tragedy.” He turned to Chase and removed a hand from his pocket and pointed it like a gun. “Here is another. It is a game changer. It is timely. It is advantageous. You are the only politician in the country who has fought in the Republic. We need to remind people of that.” He has a way of talking, carefully enunciating each word as if it were a tiny gem delivered between his teeth.

He worked as a lawyer for ten years before joining a management consulting firm that told businesses what machines to buy, which people to fire and locations to close. He developed strategic marketing platforms to boost or reinvent a corporation, making a WorldCom into an MCI, he liked to say. He was the one who approached Chase about running for governor. And now, for the first time—Chase can see it in his trembling mouth—Buffalo seems to believe in the possibility of reelection. “We need to get you behind a microphone by this evening, ideally with that plane in the background.”

“We’ll bang out a speech on the drive up?”

He considers this a moment. “No. Speak from the heart. Just make sure your heart is more furious than mournful.” On the television, another shot of the flaming wreckage. Buffalo’s glasses catch the shimmering orange light and the lenses glow like twin suns. “People are ready for fury.”

Fury is what Chase gave them, two hours later, outside the open hangar that now housed the plane, rain wetting his face, a crowd of reporters gathered around him. “What do I think?” he said to them. “I think it’s time to tighten the leash, roll up a newspaper, say
bad dog
.”

Since then he has spoken to every major news network, every magazine and newspaper, made a villain and a hero. He has earned, for the first time, his own nicknames. Dog Soldier is one. The Game Warden another. He sees his face when he logs on to AOL, when he opens
Newsweek
to read the editorial comics, when he flips the channels on the flat-screen with a cold Coors resting against his crotch. He supports a continued occupation of the Republic and a greater reliance on nuclear energy and quotes polls that indicate that the Republic by and large feels the same, its citizens dependent on the jobs and infrastructure and security the U.S. supplies. He supports the public registry—a watchdog list, he calls it. He supports vaccine research, segregation, suspended rights. “Extremism in the face of extremism,” he calls it.

All this talking exhausts him. He keeps a handful of lozenges in his pocket and finds an antidote to all the noise on the
treadmill
—pounding out five miles every evening, sweating through his clothes—and in sex. Sometimes he seduces women—the blond reporter at KOIN 6, the redheaded waitress at the Book of Kells Irish pub—and sometimes he pays for them.

Today he pays. At the day spa, in the back room, a digital thermostat on the wall reveals the temperature to be seventy-five degrees, warm enough to make him eager to kick off his boots, peel off his clothes, pile them in a heap in the corner. Jeans and a denim shirt. Corduroy jacket. Belt with a Buck knife holstered to it. Silver six-inch blade, a birthday present from his father when he turned sixteen. He carried it in the Republic and doesn’t go anywhere without it now. He retired as a colonel, and across his naked shoulder, like a bruise, he carries the faded ink of the anchor-and-eagle tattoo.

He palms a condom from his pocket. A white towel hangs from a hook. He ties it around his middle. The light is such that his shadow hardly seems to exist, oozing faintly across the floor and then the massage table. He climbs up and settles his face into the cushioned groove.

He hears the knob rattle, the door click closed, the footsteps whisper across the carpet. Her name is Choko. They visit for an hour every few weeks. Sometimes he lets her dampen his back with oil, rub the poison out of his muscles—and sometimes he does not. Sometimes he asks her to flip him over. Sometimes she takes him in her mouth or her hand. And sometimes she climbs onto the table with him.