Bones of The Moon Read online

  I shivered involuntarily. «No, nothing like that. We were just hall-friends, you know what I mean? 'Hello, good morning. How's your dog?' Nothing beyond that.»

  «And you say the dog's name was _Loopy_?» He looked at the pad in his hand. I'd been surprised at how much he'd written down so far.

  I nodded, then turned my head from side to side to ease the tension knot which sat in the middle of my neck.

  Flossmann put down his pencil and looked out of the window. «I tell ya, Mrs. James, this city's become a real bees' nest of crazies. When I first joined the force twelve years ago, you'd have some lunatic doing something like this maybe once every few months or so. Then you throw in a few horrors from the Mafia and you'd get – I don't know – maybe ten or twelve really bad murders in a year. But _now_, hell, it's like every night some bongo goes bananas and every night it's something else. Last week, down on 84th Street? Some woman got mad at her baby and crucified the poor thing on the bathroom door! I mean, can you imagine? That takes a big imagination, right? And you know what else? She must have had ten different crucifixes up in that apartment. Gold ones, ones that lit up. . . . How do they think these things up?»

  Horribly, I couldn't stop my mind from flashing a picture of Mac crucified on a wall in our apartment. My heart started beating really hard in my chest. I closed my eyes and told myself to stop it. Taking very deep breaths, I squeezed my hands together and looked at Flossmann.

  «What will happen to Alvin now?»

  «He'll be arraigned and they'll get him a lawyer and then probably send him over to Bellevue for observation. Are you okay, Mrs. James? You're looking a little queasy.»

  A week later Danny was watching a Formula One car race on television. I was puttering around the apartment accompanied by the too-loud snarl of car engines from the set.

  Coming in from the kitchen, I had a direct view of the TV when one of the cars – driven by a Colombian named Pedro Lopez – flew off the road, hit a wall and exploded.

  I froze in the doorway, unable to look away from the blaze or the burning pieces of racing car flying up and scattering all over the track.

  «He's a goner.» Danny said it in his quietest, saddest voice.

  There was great courage shown in those next few minutes. Men, some in fireproof suits and some just wearing shorts and T-shirts, came running toward the fire. They completely disregarded the soaring flames and the danger that was everywhere. Some of them had fire extinguishers, others nothing but their hands and hope. They fought the flames, fought through them to the hapless man still visible but completely motionless in what was left of the cockpit of his car.

  The commentator tried to be calm, but the sight of the poor driver burning to death made even the professional's voice quaver and finally drop to almost a whisper.

  After a few seconds, I realized I was standing there saying to myself, «Don't die. Don't die.»

  They finally killed the fire with extinguishers that blew chemical smoke everywhere and coated everything a chalky, dead white. A helicopter landed on the track and attendants ran out with a stretcher and medical bags.

  «Don't die. Don't die.» It was a litany; an incantation only I heard. I'm sure of that, because Danny never turned round the whole time I was saying it.

  The announcer said that Lopez was twenty-four and this was his first season driving a Formula One car. They eased him out of the wreck, laid him on a blue stretcher and flew him away to the hospital.

  Danny turned off the television and we waited there in its cooling, disappearing glow for something we knew was impossible: the man's life to continue.

  On the news that night, the sports announcer talked about the race and showed replays of the accident too many times. They showed a smiling picture of Lopez and said he was still alive, although in very critical condition. It was a miracle he had survived that long and the doctors were not at all optimistic about his chances.

  When I got into bed I prayed for him. I have said the Lord's Prayer every night for years before I go to sleep, but I rarely pray for anyone or anvthing in particular. I'm convinced God exists, but he doesn't need us to tell him how to run his show. He knows. But this time I asked that Lopez be allowed to live.

  In the Rondua dream that followed, all of us stood at the base of a mountain, staring unbelievingly at a small dead-white thing that looked like a piece of driftwood. Mr. Tracy turned to me and spoke in a barely restrained, excited voice.

  «You were right, Cullcn, there it is! Go and pick it up.»

  «What is it, Mommy?» Pepsi's voice, behind me and suddenly very far away, sounded scared.

  Without answering him I moved forward, stooped and picked it up. It was heavy and solid – not any kind of wood at all. I turned to the others and held it out toward them with both hands.

  «It's a bone, sweetheart. One of the Bones of the Moon.»

  I felt nothing special, nothing different. I knew what it represented, but I held and regarded it as something that made little difference .

  Felina, surprising us all, let out a cry that was half-wolf snarl, half-jubilant bark. It echoed up across the mountain and sent a gigantic flock of metal birds racketing off their perches, out on to the plains we had just crossed.

  Mr. Tracy and I looked at each other and he smiled and nodded his approval. This was why I had returned to Rondua – to help them find the first Bone of the Moon. I knewr that now, but I knew nothing else. I looked at the bone and had a terrible urge to throw it as far away from me as I could. The longer I held it, the more I realized what _it_ was and how strong it could be. It had taught me magical words, had once given me magical powers I neither wanted nor understood. It had almost killed me. I remembered that too. The Bones meant too much and I doubted again, after so many years, if anyone was capable of controlling them.

  «What _is_ it, Mommy?» My son looked at me, uncomprehending and still very afraid. Only now his fear had moved from the puzzling thing in my hand to me. He was too young to understand what it all meant, and I was incapable of explaining it to him. I was also very afraid for all of us, but I didn't know why. I felt like an animal, like a bird which suddenly feels the violent urge to fly out to sea. An earthquake is coming, but birds don't have words like that in their vocabulary – only the mysterious good sense to know things are about to go wrong and it's time to leave.

  Bees the size of coffee cans flew silently over the river. It was dusk and the water had abandoned the light. The color of brown leather, it moved sluggishly, as if something was holding back its flow.

  I took Pepsi's hand and led him down to the shore.

  «Look hard and you'll see the fish in there, Pepsi. Tonight we'll all swim together with them.»

  It was too dark to see through the deep flow. I didn't want him to be frightened, but I had forgotten children's willingness to accept anything, so long as it is wonderful. The thought of a night swim with mysterious, unknown fish was heaven to him; his small features beamed.

  I undressed and left my clothes where they fell. Pepsi was in such a hurry that in two seconds he was a tangle of sleeves and pants in an angry knot at his ankles.

  The animals waited until I had freed him and we were ready. Then they walked first into the water. I held Pepsi's hand and followed Martio's high hump. The water was cold but not uncomfortable. I felt the first smooth mud beneath my feet, between my toes. Pepsi squeezed my hand tight when the first shock of cold ran through his body.

  The fish rose as one to meet us. Their shapes and colors were impossible to describe. You could say that this one looked like a headlight with eyes, that one like a key with fins, but it would be pointless.

  We dived deep and were able to stay under as long as we pleased – Pepsi too, who earlier had said he didn't know what «swimming» was.

  The animals stayed near and let us ride on their backs for great long distances. We raced and dived and made fast, sharp turns back to where we'd started. I clung to the wolf's warm fur and watched fish slip a
nd glide across each other's phosphorescent paths. Water comets, they grouped and fled and returned to us.

  When we had been under a long time, Mr. Tracy swam to me with the first Bone in his teeth. It was very warm when I took it from him. Holding either end, I pushed down and the thing snapped easily in half. I felt a charge of energy or power go up either arm, like bubbles in a glass of ginger ale. Halved, the two pieces were much lighter in my hands. On land, it had been rock-heavy and hard, but here in the water – the only place where the moon held sway – the Bone could and _had to_ be broken for us to succeed.

  I swam to Pepsi and gestured for him to take one half. When he did, I swam a little away, then turned and faced him again. I held up my piece and nodded for him to do the same. When both our arms were up over our heads, an arc of purple light floated easily between the two parts of the Bone. There was no sound at all, no Van de Graf generator snapping static white electricity from one ground to the other. Between the pieces of bone, only a soft arcing purple light swam silently. It was very beautiful and not frightening at all.

  Later we dried off in our clothes and sat by a fire Felina had brought from miles away. The dog gave me two knives of obsidian and I handed one to Pepsi. He took it and stabbed it into the earth a few times.

  «Pepsi, tonight we're going to make our walking sticks with these pieces of bone. Watch me and you'll see how to do it.»

  The animals retreated back into the darkness and we set to work carving the Bones of the Moon. Now and then I looked toward the water and saw that all the fish were near, watching us from just beneath the surface. Their eyes glowed.

  Pepsi watched and learned three lifetimes' worth of carving in a few hours. Leaves and ocelots, a little man who looked like Alvin Williams, a woman's upturned hand filled with stones and frogs. . . . These figures and more wound up and around the pale, crooked sticks and ended up all entering the moon's broken face.

  The campfire light flickered yellow and orange across our busy hands. I kept looking up to see if Pepsi was doing it right, to make sure he didn't cut himself. My heart jumped like a dolphin in my chest to see his little boy's face so tight with concentration and concern. The sharp wrinkles that were only visiting now would someday own his face and he would be a man. We would talk intelligently then and I would be the one to ask too many questions and want his constant attention. I loved knowing he would be a man. I hated knowing the boy would disappear into photograph albums and small worn-out blue jeans that ended up as window-cleaning rags.

  He was finishing the figure of a racing car when he felt either my gaze or my sadness. Looking up abruptly, he asked if he could lick his stick when we were finished.

  «Why would you want to do _that_?»

  «Because it looks like it'll taste good.»

  I laughed and said yes and felt better. He wasn't a man yet!

  The racing driver Lopez lived. I found an article in the newspaper which said he was burned everywhere and that they were keeping him plugged in to all kinds of machinery while he slept on in a deep coma. But he lived. I kept thinking of the racing cars we had carved on our sticks in Rondua.

  One afternoon, sitting by the window with Mae, I envisioned a figure in a bed wrapped like a mummy. The only sounds around it were the jitter and hum of life-support systems. It was death in life and I knew who it was and it made me shiver uncontrollably. I thought of Lopez's family; their present pain and impossible hopes for the future. Would he continue to live for years, always at the mercy of transparent tubes and yellow dials which marked smooth brain waves and a change in body temperature of one degree?

  I thought of my husband Danny and tried to imagine how I would feel if he were Lopez and his life was being kept on only by imperceptible electric currents which entered his body every few seconds. Life was certainly precious, but death even more so in some cases. In the quietest whisper, I said, «Let him die.»

  He died the next morning.

  5

  Eliot Kilbertus and I became great pals because we kept bumping into each other in the basement laundry room. One look at him told you he was as gay as Dick's hatband. He'd often arch his left eyebrow up into his scalp and his hands did little fan dances when he spoke to you – but oh, how he spoke!

  «I have been _spying_ on you and your husband ever since you moved in, you know. You're Cullen James, right? I'm Eliot Kilbertus. Actually, my real name is Clayton _Drury_, but I changed it when I was seven. I mean, Drury-Dreary, right? I refuse to go through my life sounding like a Dickens character. Where did you get that sweater?»

  «Bloomingdale's.»

  «I thought so. You should buy only Italians, honey. They _last_.»

  «Could you move over a little, Eliot? I can't see my dryer.»

  That first day we talked, he was so «on» that I thought he was trying out for a part in some show and had mistaken me for the casting director. He didn't stop for a minute and his monologue ranged from the genius of Italian designers to his pug dog, Zampano, who was at the time suffering from the flu.

  «Of course dogs get flu, Cullen. Are you mad? Imagine walking down the sidewalks of New York in bare feet. What you'd pick up! AIDS galore. Plague Paradise, _kinder_. Would you like to come up to my apartment after we're done here? I've only got one more rinse. Your daughter is extremely quiet, Cullen. Is she dead?»

  His place was campy and fun. He wrote film reviews for one of the gay New York newspapers and his walls were covered with posters of terrible films like _Attack of the Killer Tomatoes_ and _Senior Prom_.

  He made delicious cappucino in one of those ornate silver Gaggia machines I'd seen so often in the expresso bars in Italy. Then he picked up one of his dog's squeaky toys and after giving it a thorough washing in the sink, held it over Mae's traveling bed and squeezed it until she started to cry.

  «Well, I mean, what do you want, honey? I'm not Captain Kangaroo!»

  «I think she hates that, Eliot. But thanks for trying.»

  He calmed down over the course of the afternoon and was speaking normally by the time I looked at my watch and realized how late it was. We made a date for lunch together the next day and I went home feeling good.

  Danny liked him too. The first time Eliot came over for dinner, he was surprisingly shy and on his best behavior. For a while. Once he saw how nice and unjudgmental my husband was, he fired right up again and had us giggling all through the spinach lasagne.

  «Oh Cullen, you really _are_ a vegetarian! I just thought you were slim. But you must give Mae meat, though; I'm totally serious about that. My friend Roger Waterman was brought up vegetarian and he turned into an accountant!»

  In between the exclamation points and cunning remarks, Eliot Kilbertus was a considerate, overly generous man. He worked at home most of the time and would often call up and ask if I would like him to baby-sit for a while so that I could go out and do things. Sometimes I took him up on the offer because it was genuine and not an «I'll do you a favor _IF_ you'll do me one» sort of thing. He liked us and we liked him and we began spending more and more time together.

  When we got to know each other better, he admitted he was wealthy because he was an only child and his parents had been in Florida real estate before they died. They had left him «great skads» of money which he had invested carefully and successfully. Every time he came to dinner he brought some kind of extravagant wine or bread or pate that didn't have anything to do with what I was serving but tasted good anyhow.

  He always dressed in beautiful clothes, which he bought on semi-annual trips to Europe where he «went mad buying and eating and doing.» When he heard that we had lived for a year in Italy, he shook his head and told us we were retarded to have ever moved back to the United States of McDonald's. When Danny asked Eliot why _he_ didn't live over there, he shrugged and said he couldn't read Italian movie magazines and none of the drug stores sold dental floss.

  When the weather was okay, we'd go out walking with Mae in her carriage and the two of us on ei
ther side. Then another side of Eliot showed itself. I soon realized he _couldn't_ have lived anywhere but New York, because it was one of the few things he really loved. A walk with him meant an ongoing lecture about architecture, Frederick Law Olmstead's original plans for Central Park and where the best walnut brownies in the city could be found.

  He took us to gallery openings and to a concert in Soho where thirty-two people listened to six people snip the air with scissors, all thirty-eight of us wearing totally serious expressions on our faces. It was a hoot; both Danny and I loved it. When the concert was over, Danny slipped into a dime store and bought three pairs of those silver, round-ended scissors like you had in kindergarten.

  «Let's go home and do an encore!»

  Wednesday afternoons Eliot and I got into the habit of having lunch together in our apartment. He'd eat a meatball wedge or a souvlaki gyro, while I polished off hunks of feta cheese and black Greek olives or spaghetti al burro. When we were done, we would settle down for a couple of hours of gab.

  That's how I found out about his interest in the occult. He told me about a party he'd gone to where they had used a ouija board to summon the ghost of Amelia Earhart. I rolled my eyes at that and asked if she had flown into the room. That made him very mad. He believed wholeheartedly in «other powers» and was offended when I joked about the subject. It was one of the only times he ever got mad at me.

  «You're such a little wise guy, Cullen. Let me see your hand.»

  Rondua galloped across my mind and I felt uneasy about letting him have a look.

  «Oh come on, Cullen. I'm not asking you to undress. Just let me look at your hand; I want to see what's up with you.»

  I knew the left hand was what you're born with and the right is what you've done with it. I didn't know which would be more revealing to let him see.

  «No, give me your right hand. Okay, let's see what we have here.»

  He didn't take one look and jump in the air which, after my recent Rondua dreams, I was half-expecting. He squeezed the pads of my palm and fingers, then turned the hand over and back a few times.