Biting the Moon (37 page)

“No,” Andi said again, and turned back to the rainy window.

“What're you thinking about?”

“Sergei.”

Mary was surprised she wasn't thinking about Harry Wine.

“What?”

“I was just thinking: maybe it's all he has left, I mean, maybe it's the only way he can be around the animals—”

Mary scoffed. “Oh, come on, Andi. It should be the very opposite: he shouldn't be able to stand these so-called hunts. If you had a favorite dog or cat—let's say Jules. If the only way you could be around him was to watch him get tortured, would you?” Mary thought the answer was obvious, yet Andi didn't answer right away. “Well, for God's sakes, what's to
think
about?”

“But what if somehow it would—diminish what Jules had to suffer?”

“That's crazy. So Jules would be looking at you wondering why you didn't save him. That's going to make him feel better?” She was angry because she felt she was taking on the position that was ordinarily Andi's own and didn't like it. It was too heavy, too weighty, one of those
holes, those keepers that could suck her down, like Peggy and Floyd, drowning. “What do you believe? You always seemed to believe so much in what you're doing.”

Andi turned from the window and turned on Mary a look of aggrieved puzzlement. “I don't know what I'm doing.”

Mary fell back on the bed.

“Are we leaving tomorrow?”

Mary looked toward the window. “Yeah. I guess.”

Andi sighed. “Then I'll have to see Harry tonight.”

Mary sat up. “
What
?” Had Andi never stopped thinking about Harry Wine? “You're not going out there!”

“You want to come with me?”

“You're not going, I'm not going,
we're
not going!”

Reuel had driven them before on this road, and Mary hadn't been paying a lot of attention. Right now, the dark didn't help. Mary (who'd insisted on driving) said she wouldn't recognize the turnoff from this highway to Wine's.

“I can remember,” said Andi. “There was a farm, and a little farther there was a scarecrow in a white hat near a white water tower.”

Mary remembered none of this. How could she have overlooked, how forgotten a white-hatted scarecrow? It was one of those times when she wondered if the two of them had been moving through the same world.

“There it is.” Andi pointed into the darkness.

Mary could make out the ghostly, skeletal water tower and the blowing shape of the scarecrow. She could only see the scarecrow because of its white hat. Where on earth would anyone who lived around here have gone to be wearing that white top hat?

“Maybe it's the scarecrow that went,” said Andi. A moment later, she said, “Here!” Coming up was a near-invisible entrance to a dirt road. “Through those pines.”

Mary slowed, turned. She did think she recognized the rutted road, the general look of ruination, and, a short bumpy ride farther, what was the Swann house.

It looked as if every light had been turned on inside the misshapen pile of bricks and boards that was Bonnie's. It could have lit a raft all the way down the Salmon. Every room was awash in gold and carmine lights that, from a distance, made it look as if the house was on fire. All the Swann kids must have been up. Mary doubted any rules for bedtime were enforced.

Mary thought she saw a light separate from the windows'. “Is that a flashlight?” It appeared to be beckoning them to stop.

It was Bonnie Swann, and she sounded anxious. When they stopped, she peered in the window, said, “You ain't seen my boy Brill, have you?”

“No.” They shook their heads. “Has he gone off?” asked Mary.

“Yeah. I looked in the usual places.”

Mary couldn't imagine what was “usual” in this woodland. “Do you want us to help you look?”

“Well, if you're goin' down this road, keep your eyes peeled, will ya? And tell him he's gettin' a whippin'.”

“Okay.” Somehow Mary didn't think that would give Brill much motivation to go back home.

Mary switched off the headlights and had the car crawling along the road so they could watch out for Brill. They saw nothing, and Mary pulled into the big parking lot, empty of all but the van, Harry's truck, and a car, and switched off the engine.

They got out of the car and Andi tossed her backpack over one shoulder. She took it everywhere. Mary told her she was paranoid about people taking her backpack.

“Wouldn't you be?” Andi smiled.

There were signs of a recent campfire, its remains carelessly left burning, only partly gray ashes. “I guess he's here; that's his truck and probably his car.”

There was a light on in one of the motel units. Otherwise, the night was black as a cave, the moon obscured by clouds. As quietly as they could (and Mary wondered at their secretiveness), they made their way along the concrete walkway to the room with the light on. Someone inside was talking. Though the voice was low, Mary knew it belonged to Harry Wine. She raised her hand to knock, but Andi pulled it away, pointing to the latch. The door wasn't locked; indeed, it was open enough to see a bar of light through it.

With her finger, very slowly, Andi pushed it open.

Mary was blinded by lights, bright as new money inside. She threw her forearm up to shade her eyes and saw the lights were the kind photographers use to set up around their cameras. Had it not been for what Jack Kite and Reuel had said, she would have supposed this was just one more stop in the fantasy nightmare. Harry Wine had his hands on Brill's shoulders. Brill was naked as a jay, not a stitch on him, and engrossed in trying to take apart some small object, some puzzle or toy that he held in his hands. Nor was he distracted from this operation by the girls coming in.

Oh, God,
thought Mary.

Harry saw them, rose quickly from his crouching position.

Even as he was rising you could see he was composing some lie. “What're you . . . how'd you get here?”

“Drove,” said Andi, in the same cold voice she'd used with Sergei.

He actually smiled. “Brill here's just had a bath. I found him outside in a mudhole. God only knows what he thought he was doing. But Bonnie's kids just run wild, you know? How about you girls? Want to join us?”

It was the seamiest smile Mary had ever seen. A “dirty” smile, if there was such a thing, that corrupted his good looks, emptied his
handsome face of what last traces of humanity it had. She couldn't have smiled back if he'd held a knife to her throat. Mary knew her own face was taut and white; she'd felt the blood draining from it as soon as they'd stepped through the door and she made out what was before her.

Brill looked at them with the same vacant stare he'd used at the landfill, smiled the same vacant smile.

“I imagine you've already got my photo,” said Andi.

Mary, who'd been holding herself completely still lest she scream or lash out, looked at Andi, baffled.

Harry said nothing for a moment, and then, “What the hell are you talking about?” But the question sounded more alarmed than puzzled.

“Mary knows all about it.”

Harry, for the first time, looked at Mary and looked uncertain.

Mary simply could not find her voice to confirm what must have been an inspired guess on Andi's part. She tried to say something, but it was locked in her throat.

Andi said, “Bonnie's worried about Brill; we can take him home.”

The sexual climate having been dispelled by their intrusion, Harry seemed to lose all interest in the boy. He scraped Brill's undershorts and shirt and pants from the bed. “Here, kid. Get dressed.” He tossed them.

Brill stood there, looking sad. Was the game over? Mary told Brill to come across the room and stand by her. But when nothing more demanding of his attention occurred, he went back to turning the painted wooden block in his hands.

“I said, get dressed!” snapped Harry. “He knows his way home.”

This was something Mary would rather not have found out. When Brill had finished struggling into his clothes, she said, “I'll take him outside.” But she had no intention of leaving herself. She took his hand and, when they were outside, she told him to go right home. He looked uncertain, walked off a little way. She was torn between going with him and going back in. Back in won.

Harry was on the bed, leaning back, propped on one elbow. He was wearing black cords and a turtleneck sweater. He had lighted a cigarette, seemed perfectly at ease, smoking it.

“Along the highway, Colorado, the—hell, I can't remember just what road it was. You were walking away from an accident. I mean, when I nearly passed you, you were a quarter mile away.”

Andi took a step back as if she'd struck something heavy. “What do you mean?”

“Babe”—he laughed—“just what I said. You were hitching rides. At least you were walking along the highway. What did you think? You think I crawled in your bedroom window and stole you? There was a helluva pileup on the road. I could see the fire when I was coming the other way. A semi plowed into a school bus that was pulled over in one of those small picnic places by the side of the road. No survivors, the paper said later. And then after I finally passed it, I saw you walking along, like I said.”

“You thought I was on that bus?”

“Not then. Later, next morning, when I read the paper. Like I said, the bus got demolished; so did the semi. Wreckage and bodies strewn to hell and gone. No survivors. None except you. You must've got off that bus for some reason. And—lucky you—it was after that when the semi plowed into it.” He smiled as if Andi were a rabbit he'd pulled out of a hat.

“Except
me
?” She stepped back again. “But . . . how'd you know I was on that bus? Did I tell you?”

Harry laughed. “No, you weren't much for talking back then. Now you can't keep your mouth shut. I liked you better then.” He flashed his white teeth. “It was your backpack.” He pointed to it where it lay in a forgotten heap. “The initials,
A. O.
The bus belonged to a place called Alhambra Orphanage. The firefighters found all kinds of stuff in the wreckage with
A. O.
on it. What the hell did you think the letters stood for, your name?”

Mary covered her face with her hands and wanted to weep, for this more than for almost anything else that had happened. To sit down in the doorway and cry. To have come this far, to have searched so hard, only to discover there was no loving family, no candles in the Olivier windows, no Marcus to paint, no charitable Sue, no badminton court, no Jules to chase the badminton birds. The doorway in this cabin led not to a brighter day beyond it but inward, to an even darker room,
one still more anonymous. Alhambra Orphanage. Mary did not know if hearing bad news made the place where it was revealed even darker and more threatening, but it seemed to, here.

Andi's voice was barely audible. “Why didn't you take me back there? To the orphanage, when you found out?”

Harry actually laughed. “It was someplace in Utah. What the hell? I don't remember, and I sure wasn't driving to fucking Utah.”

Andi's voice was tight, raspy. But she stayed with it. “What happened then?”

Harry shrugged, as if what had happened following the accident was of no account. “Went to Cripple Creek—when you mentioned it, I thought maybe you'd remembered. Then to Santa Fe. To that god-awful Orr woman's place. I had business in Albuquerque and Silver City, like I told you when I picked you up that night in the truck. It wasn't hard to find you. I figured you'd take one of the roads out of town, that you wouldn't want to go
into
town. Not if you thought that's where I was. The car got a busted tailpipe. I borrowed that truck from a friend in Santa Fe.”

Mary stared at him, scarcely able to believe he was saying this, that anyone who had done what he'd done could be so matter-of-fact.

“Did you find me later? Did you find the—” She stopped.

“Later?” He shook his head. “No. Oh, you mean that cabin? Yeah, I was there once. Wasn't hard to find. But did you think I kept on looking for you for months? Hell, you're not
that
great.” He laughed, perfectly comfortable lying there on the bed, smoking another cigarette.

“Just enough . . . to make me . . . get into bed.” She said it almost drunkenly, as if memory had come staggering back.

Only then did Harry seem aware the mood had shifted. He was silenced. The cabin was deathly quiet; Mary could hear a tuneless humming on the walk outside. Brill had come back. Or never left.

“What happened to Peggy Atkins?”

“Peggy? She died just like I said; she got messed up in hydraulics, a hole at Big Mallard Rapids. A keeper's bad news, just plain hell.”

“With some help from you? Maybe just a nudge? You had something going with her, didn't you?”

He laughed. “Something. Not nearly as much as Peggy thought, though. You jealous? Is that what you're—”

“She was giving you trouble, wasn't she?”

“Look, I don't know what—” But something about Andi must have stopped him. “Hey, babe, why waste time talking about Peggy? You're a hell of a lot better.”

In a motion so swift and fluid that Mary nearly missed it, Andi's hand flew into her backpack, the pack fell to the floor, and the Smith & Wesson was in her hand. Mary stepped back, wide-eyed, upsetting a lamp. The clamor it made, saturating the room with noise, didn't appear to register on Andi, whose eyes were riveted on Harry Wine.

He took a stumbling step backward. “Jesus, is that thing loaded?”

Andi slapped the magazine home, pulled back the slide. “It is now.”

Harry looked wildly around, eyes vacuuming the room for some weapon, some defense.