V-Wars

“Maybe I’m the wake-up call the people around here have needed for centuries.”

— 13 —

The mountains to the west are too far to see, so it’s a long time until nightfall. Hunger twists in her gut and the child moves with it, pushing restlessly at the walls of her womb. With Mother Gaso watching her never-ending television shows inside, Mooney sits on a battered lawn chair in the bare ground area at the back of the trailer, ignoring the textbook on her lap and instead watching the sun sink like a ball of liquid yellow fire in the washed-out western sky. This is the time when the sun is at its strongest and she soaks in the heat greedily, pulling her blouse up to expose the stretched skin of her belly and warming herself like a snake on a rock. The baby rolls and moves almost constantly, and she’s amused by the tiny bulges that rise and fall along the otherwise smooth and round surface. The movement increases as the light gives way to dusk and finally darkness, tiny fists and feet lightly battering her insides as though the infant is showing its frustration at her food-deprived stomach. Or is the baby itself hungry? She thinks the answer is yes on both accounts.

Mooney rises and walks into the desert. She needs no preparation, no weapons or water. Above her is another three-quarter moon, waning just as it was the last time she fed; she thinks this is pretty funny — no doubt someone will make this connection and start blathering about werewolves, and someone else will act like an “expert” and point out that werewolves only come out during the full moon. If there’s a reason at all to the timing, it’s far more likely that the moonlight enables her to hunt more easily.

And so that her prey can see her more easily, she has not changed from the bright yellow peasant blouse she slipped on this morning. She is a splotch of unexpected color in the night, luminous in the moonlight as she weaves a path between the mesquite and acacia trees, the cholla and prickly pear. The brittle grasses nip at her ankles but she makes no sound as she moves across the rock-strewn ground and works her way steadily through the sparse knee-high scrub. She heads southwest and walks for nearly three hours before she finds what she wants, and she locates them long before she allows them to see her.

Three silhouettes of men, dark-skinned Mexicans who have no right to be in her country. They have found a reasonably deep dry wash sheltered by older mesquite trees and used it to conceal the tiny fire they’ve built to try and hold off the bitter desert cold. Mooney can smell the rabbit they’ve caught and spitted above the fire, its bloody pelt carelessly tossed aside for the insects and scavengers. She moves closer, still not making a sound, and breathes deeply …

Oh, yes.

She wouldn’t have been able to do this, to know what she does, had it not been for her New York trip and the gift that Michael Frayne bestowed upon her that day in Starbucks. Now, however, her world is entirely different — she is different. Their scents swirl inside her nose and fill her with memories, none of which are good: the beating, the pain, the rape, their mocking, triumphant laughter. Even so, she is oddly calm, ruled not by anger but by cold logic and need. She must feed, and in doing that, she will also have justice. How fitting.

Mooney steps from the shadows of a nearby mesquite tree and stands in the moonlight.

The first one jerks as he sees the bright yellow of her blouse, then he shouts and runs toward her. His companions do the same — no hesitation, no stopping to think or question the presence of a brightly-dressed woman so far into the emptiness of a nighttime desert. It is only when she doesn’t run that they slow and circle her warily, like a trio of coyotes measuring a larger animal before their attack. One has some kind of club, another a small machete, the third nothing but his bare hands. They jabber away in Spanish but Mooney cannot understand them — she knows only a few basic words in Spanish because what little second language she has is Tohono O’odham. What she does comprehend, however, is the universal sound of their cruel merriment. The tallest one, unarmed, is the boldest and he reaches to grab her arm, then his face goes rigid with shock as he recognizes her. There is something in her face that makes him yank his hand aside as his laugh sputters away. Her black eyes reflect the moonlight and look like slits of silver. The other two glance from him, their leader, to her and back again; recognition slides across their features and suddenly they, too, realize that something here is terribly, terribly wrong.

“Do you remember?” Mooney whispers.

She has no idea if they know what she is saying, but their size, number, and weapons are simply no match for her. She lunges at the one with the knife first, catching the wrist of the other man before the downswing of his club can connect. She snaps the bones as though they are kindling at the same time her teeth plunge into her target’s shoulder. She feels that same semi-pleasurable pulse in her jaw and he reels away from her, his dirt-encrusted knife dropping forgotten to the ground. The first Mexican is screaming at the night sky, his voice raw and loud and shattering the desert’s tranquility; his club had tumbled away when she crushed his wrist and now she wrenches him forward and bites him, too. His wails change to a strangled sound and he topples to the side, rolling into a ball and spasming in the spiky weeds next to the other one. Instinctively Mooney knows they are beyond saving and will die whether or not anyone arrives to help them. Had she realized this, she would have bitten that woman last month, given her a mercy kill before leaving her to die in the agonizing grip of the prickly pear cactus. Live and learn.

The leader of the trio is not as brazen as his companions. He snatches up the machete and backs away to what he thinks is a safe distance, holding the blade in an easy grip that speaks of experience. His gaze skips away from her face to focus on her belly, and Mooney can feel his bewilderment as he dares to try to meet her eyes again. Does he wonder how she can defeat them in her condition? Or does he wonder about something else? She decides to enlighten him.

“Tu,” she says and points to him. Then she points at her stomach. “Padre.”

The expression on his face is, as has been said in a thousand television commercials, priceless.

He shakes his head vehemently. “No,” he says. “Yo no soy el padre.”

Mooney just smiles and nods.

And leaps for him.

It is over almost too quickly to be satisfying. As fast as he is with the machete, it is nowhere near fast enough — the blade never even comes close. The thing that saves her from complete disappointment is the feeding; he is larger than the man she killed last month, and she is hungrier. She drinks deeply and slowly, her lips pressed intimately against the artery just below the man’s jaw, enjoying the warmth, flavor and spiciness of his blood and feeling the excitement of her baby ease to satiation as her stomach fills and the nutrients flow from her to it. The sensation is almost orgasmic, fueled as it is not only by hunger but revenge — how fitting that this child should be nourished by the blood of its father. By the time she is finished and she drops his corpse unceremoniously on the dirt, his companions are also dead, the toxins from her bite having sent her retribution through their bloodstream.

Mooney leaves their bodies in the red dirt of the desert and, because it’s exactly what they deserve, hopes that its creatures will tear them apart.

— 14 —

They come for her in the early morning, on the last day of the year. She stands on the front steps and watches Delgado’s blue and white police car turn into the dirt driveway, followed by two green and white Border Patrol vehicles, one an oversized SUV, the other one of those super-fast Chargers all the cops are driving around in these days. There are a handful of additional cars behind those — two rattling pick-up trucks and three dirty old sedans, all of which she’s often seen around town. She wonders why they need all these vehicles, and in particular the police SUV. Perhaps they think she is too big to sit in the back seat of one of the regular cars, although any such speculation is probably due to her last, uncomfortable-looking appearance in town on the final day of the semester, only the day after her triple killing in the desert. She dismisses the idea as quickly as it runs through her mind; that they would ever be concerned with how she feels is ludicrous. Whether they are or aren’t is irrelevant anyway; a lot has happened since two weeks ago, and she is not the same Red Moon Lopez she once was.

Mooney finds the fact that Chief Delgado has brought the Border Patrol as backup insulting, their very presence as contradictory as her own modern day existence as a Native American. Everyone pounds their fists for equality and fair treatment in the white man’s world, but at the same time they put labels on themselves and borders on their land and scream at the first idea of integrating into the rest of the country. Instead of being American, Mooney is Native American; instead of being Tohono O’odham, Mooney is an outcast; instead of being human, she is a vampire. Each layer of classification results in more separation, uncompromising and isolating. Where is the equality for her in this situation? Or for those like her? It is, she thinks, the ultimate hypocrisy: the oppressed Native Americans turn on her and, if the men coming toward her home are any indication, single her out for elimination, or at the very least, imprisonment. Assuming they plan to let her survive the next hour, would they someday walk her and the others who emerge as a new species of human along their own Trail of Tears?

Instead of pulling in close to the trailer, all the cars stop a hundred or so feet away. One by one the engines shut off but no one gets out until Chief Delgado finally opens his door and heaves his bulky frame into the eye-blistering morning sunlight. He must be the catalyst for everyone else to act courageous, because more doors open and men spill forth like bad examples of vigilantism, hips swaggering under the weight of gun belts, a couple of others armed with hunting rifles, their holds careless and loose as they try their best to fake their bravery. They stand and stare in her direction, as if willing her to simply walk down the steps and hold out her wrists for a set of handcuffs. She can feel their uncertainty from here, can smell the fear seeping from their sweat glands, even from this distance. At last Chief Delgado starts toward the trailer with the others lagging behind; the sight of Delgado’s “backup” makes the phrase I got your back run through Mooney’s mind with a new and mocking definition. Such loyalty.