Biting the Moon (2 page)

S*A*N*D*I*A*

Sandia Crest. It was hidden in the text of the mountains. She really liked that; it seemed true when she thought about it: A*N*D*I.
Andi.
That was the name she had given herself.

She went out at dawn to check the traps again. There were three of them, spaced at some twenty-foot intervals in a jagged line across a ridge, northwest of the cabin. It had stopped snowing, at least; the red sled loaded down with the blankets and backpack left a clean, deep trail in the soft snow behind her. The backpack was full of medical supplies, her sandwiches, and a thermos of tea. She always took food with her, for there was no telling when a storm would come up and make things impassable even with her snowshoes. Or she'd get lost. She wasn't really troubled about that, not since she had been taking the same route for three months. But she still took the map she had drawn the first time she had gone out. That had been a smart thing to do, drawing in trees, rock formations—anything that would serve as a landmark, a series of landmarks, to follow back. For in the snow, everything was of an illusory sameness that could keep her from distinguishing one stand of pines from another.

She visited the cave first (“her” cave, she liked to think of it) to build a fire. This done and the flames fanned, she went on inspection. Nothing in the first two traps (she had to sweep the fresh layers of snow away), but drawing near the third, she heard some sound, a muffled
yip,
repeated several times. Snow-mounded, the swift fox cub was trying to keep its head aboveground. There were tracks and a small tumult of snow around the cub and the trap. The mother was probably close by.

She dug the snow out of the way and fastened her hands on both sides of the trap where the young fox's front leg was clamped, and she wondered if the cub or its mother had been biting at the leg, trying to free it. She still saw no sign of the vixen.

It was concentration more than strength that allowed her to pull the trap apart and free the cub, who shook himself in a baffled way but did not try to run. She wrapped it in the blanket and put it on the sled but did not give it a shot of codeine, for she was concerned about the right dose for such a young animal.

The sun was rising as she pulled the sled along. The wind dropped, and all she heard was the rasp of its gliders through the russet stillness and her own steps as her feet cracked the crust of snow, glazed by the
sun like pink cellophane. She thought she saw a moving shadow to her right, and looked that way through the trees, but saw nothing. The shadow followed her, she was sure.

In the cave, she looked at the cub's damaged front leg. When she'd cleaned the blood and dirt away she saw that it was not as bad as it had looked. The snow might have helped there. She cut a length of bandage and wrapped it around the leg while the cub just looked at her. It yawned. Every so often, she'd look beyond the cave's mouth to see if the vixen was there. She knew it was around.

After wrapping the blanket around the cub again and settling it by the fire, she unrolled the sleeping bag (which she brought along to sit or lie on in the event she spent some time in the cave) and, with it, the gun. She always brought that along too, always hoping she wouldn't need to use it.

She had found the gun just before she'd left the bed-and-breakfast place, found it buried in some rags back in the trunk of the Camaro: the gun, the clips, the ammunition, even a holster of black webbing. She couldn't imagine anyone but a lawman needing a holster. She knew—had known—nothing about guns then; this one she had always handled with respect, not respect for its purpose—which was to kill—but for its power. She'd had the gun and the ammunition but no knowledge of how it worked until she'd come across an old gun manual in the cabin. And after the time when she thought someone had been in the cabin when she'd gone to check the traps—the displacement of small objects, a faint, musky scent that might have been cologne, overlaid with the smell of tobacco—it was then she told herself she'd have to know how to shoot.

She had no idea how he could have found her, how he could have tracked her down to the cabin. It might have been only her imagination, but it had worried her to death, and all that night she hadn't been able to sleep.

In the morning, she'd taken the gun from between some linen towels for drying dishes and set it carefully on the table. Then she'd removed the two clips that she'd slotted into the CD holder. Finally, she'd taken the box of ammunition from a cereal box. All of these she spaced carefully on the table and looked at them.

The gun was a Smith & Wesson; it was printed on the stock. The ammunition was nine millimeter, the size she would expect a cartridge to be, although she didn't know why. The clips were full of a staggered line of these cartridges. She leafed through the book and couldn't find the exact model she had before her, but she found a couple of others that were very nearly like it. Looking from book to gun (a semiautomatic, she discovered), touching each part more than once to make sure she knew them: barrel, slide, safety, hammer. Trigger, of course. Then the ammunition, the cartridge: primer, casing, bullet. Since there was no clip inside, it wasn't loaded, but all the same she picked it up and carefully pulled the trigger a couple of times. It felt as if the trigger resisted; she had to pull hard.

The book of course assumed you knew something about firearms, and there were no directions as such, only what she could infer from the text. It told her there were twelve cartridges in a semiautomatic, fourteen if the cartridges were “staggered.” She looked at the bottom of one of the clips and assumed this positioning of the cartridges was staggering. So in one round, you could fire fourteen times. Fourteen without reloading. Then you could eject the first clip and slam home another one in seconds, probably
a
second if your life depended on it. Hers didn't, so she did not fit the clip in the magazine by giving it a “smart slap.” She shoved it in, slowly. In the time it took her to get the clip in, she could see herself fall on the bloodied ground several times over, in front of her assailant.

Well, she would have to practice. She could make a target out of something, paint a bull's-eye on something, and practice shooting.

She had done this several times, careful not to waste ammunition—her supply was, after all, limited. She put cotton in her ears and wound a scarf around her head like a wide ribbon to hold the cotton in place. She held her arms straight out and tried to position her hands as she remembered seeing cops do it on television (but why she should remember this and not her own name, she couldn't imagine). The first time she'd thumbed the safety down, aimed, and fired, the discharge toppled her onto the ground.

Over several weeks, she'd improved; she was steadier and actually managed to get several shots inside the bull's-eye. But it was the feel of
shooting she was after; she wanted the physical act of it to be less foreign to her. Not that she would ever get comfortable with it, just more familiar.

Familiarity, though, did not lessen her fear of the Smith & Wesson. She would look at it often, almost as if it were some kind of icon, lying before her on the white porcelain table: hard as a trapper's heart, cold as death, black as sin.

Along the highway, a few miles from the city and a short distance from the general store where she went to get her supplies, Andi got a ride from a woman with pearl-gray hair and rings on nearly all her fingers. As Andi was counting the rings, the woman was lecturing her about the dangers of hitchhiking, telling her she should feel lucky that she herself had come along; there was all kinds of trouble a girl might meet up with.

Andi counted nine rings, mostly silver and turquoise, but she thought she saw a ruby and an emerald winking on the far side of the steering wheel. The woman went on talking about the awful things that could happen to a young girl—well, to anybody, really, if one weren't careful. It sounded to Andi as if the driver enjoyed exploring the menu of crimes against one's person that could result from getting in cars with strangers. Did her parents know she was hitchhiking? Her parents, said the woman, would be pretty upset.

Politely, Andi agreed. “Yes, ma'am.” Then she thought she really should contribute to the conversation beyond
no, ma'am,
and
yes, ma'am,
so she told the woman about an imaginary aunt and how she was the only one in the entire family that the aunt liked, and why not? for she was the only person who ever bothered to visit her. This aunt had told Andi that when she passed on (Andi was careful not to refer to “death”) she was going to leave Andi all her jewelry. Her aunt loved rings.

Andi had found that the solace of remembering nothing was the freedom to invent everything. She peopled her life with aunts, uncles, parents, dogs, and cats. “Olivier” was her family name. The
O
on her backpack had decided that, after she'd run down a list of possible
O
-names. Every day, she added a little bit to her Olivier history. There was a black cat named Ink and a dog named Jules. There had been no sick aunt; she had just at that moment invented her.

But while she was free to improvise this history, she knew it was an awful freedom, for nothing, no one, was anchored. They had slipped the reins. They could be anywhere. They could be nowhere. She bent her head.

The driver, whose own name was Foster, Mrs. Foster, clucked approval every so often at Andi's attentions to the bedridden aunt. Mrs. Foster then turned the conversation to herself as she made a right onto Santa Fe's Paseo de Peralta, chatting about her social standing, until they came to the cross street where Andi had asked to be deposited. Mrs. Foster told her that she had enjoyed their talk. “It's not often one meets up with a teenager who has such a sense of family and family responsibility.”

It was a quarter to six. The pharmacy closed at six, which was why she wanted to come at this time. It had happened purely by accident one day weeks ago, just before closing then, too. She was in line before two other customers and had paid for a tube of toothpaste. Afterward, she had stopped in front of the magazine display, which she hadn't seen before, hidden as it was by tall shelves of soaps and shampoos. The flickering of the fluorescent lights had registered dimly in her mind as she stood reading a magazine. At the rear of the store, the lights had
blinked off. And then the center rows did the same. Someone had been closing up.

On that first visit she had observed the pharmacist in his white jacket at work in a very small room, a cubicle on a raised platform from which he could look out over the drugstore much like a lighthouse keeper. It was he who had been locking up; he must have assumed she was among those customers who had gone out. Through the rows of shelves, she remembered seeing him walking through the store up to the front, where he must have flicked another set of switches, for the fluorescent lights in the front part of the room had flickered off. All except for the small lights that illuminated the big plate-glass window and its displays.

When he had started walking again toward the back, she had hunkered down so he wouldn't see her. A door opened and thudded shut. All was quiet. He must have left through a rear door, perhaps to get in a car parked in back. She waited awhile, wondering why she was doing this. After she heard a car engine engage, she still waited, sitting on the cold floor, listening for the sound of the engine to die out in the distance.

Finally, she had risen, acutely and uncomfortably aware of herself and the fact that she was alone here and doing something surely illegal by remaining. She stepped carefully away from the magazines and made her way past the shelves of Neutrogena and Clairol, past the film and flashlights, where she disengaged a palm-sized disposable flashlight.

She walked up the three steps to the pharmacist's cubicle, his glass-bound perch. It struck her as awfully exposed, perhaps to reassure customers that he was doing nothing at all that wouldn't bear public scrutiny. The narrow beam of the flashlight played over the shelves. What she then realized she was after—it came to her in a flash—was a painkiller, liquid so that it could be injected. And a hypodermic needle. That, she thought, would probably be easy, but the drug would be difficult. She knew the names of one or two; beyond that, she knew nothing. In front of her was a cabinet with a metal clasp and a lock. On the glass shelves of the cabinet were several bottles, capped and stoppered. She ran the flashlight up under the shelf below the cabinet, thinking
the key might have been secreted there. But the pharmacist would probably have all of these keys on a ring together and would keep the ring by him. She went on around the small room, playing the flashlight on copper-colored vials and white jars. Lord, there was enough Percodan and Valium to keep all of Santa Fe happy.

Beside the jar of Percodan was a bottle of viscous fluid that had on its label
MORPHINE
. It was small enough to shove into a back pocket of her jeans, but big enough to make the pocket bulge. Another brief search of a few drawers exposed some disposable hypodermic needles, and she took several of these.

That first visit had been three months ago. She'd been back once since, but had first made a visit to a veterinary office to get information. What she'd told him was that she had an old dog (named Jules, Jules invented on the spot for this purpose) who'd got arthritis in his hip and it probably needed some kind of operation. She was afraid of this (she'd told the vet), afraid it would be horribly painful.

The vet told her they had pills to take care of that.

But Jules won't take pills. I've—we've
(better make it look like a whole houseful of adults was solidly behind her and Jules in this venture)
tried giving him pills and it's just impossible. Don't you have some liquid stuff? Stuff you can inject?