DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
thatcraftykid
track two // “ANY COLOR YOU LIKE”
A HEART OF GOLD
He shuts his eyes and puts his aching hands behind his head.
“Moon can’t be all it’s cracked up to be, kid.”
– Logan –
The glint in the old man’s eye makes Logan take a deeper drag on his cigar. Glint doesn’t dim in the cloud of smoke, though Buffalo’s cragged expression remains unaffected. He continues his methodical wipe down of the bar top.
Logan hasn’t exchanged two words with Buffalo since taking his stool, but that’s how, in the old days, they both preferred these meetings to start. Logan because even though the IOUs used to be stacked up in his favor he still felt in debt, and Buffalo because he fancied himself a great reader of body language. Now there’s wariness on both sides.
To hasten the start of a one-sided conversation – and his drive back north – Logan moves his attention to where Buffalo’s grandson stands at the door, counting out change with his good arm. When his empty sleeve falls in the way, he lets a pretty girl tie it off for him. Free admission for a kiss on the cheek.
“Can’t fault moneymaking sense for that,” Buffalo says, addressing a row of liquor. “Billy has turned all my businesses around. We’re opening a hotel lodge next year. We bought property ten miles east of the reservation. No favors needed since you ran off that sonuvabitch excuse for a sheriff. Doing real good now.”
Must be. No doubt, crowd is bigger than it was three years ago, and it’s only happy hour. Younger, too. A couple barbed-wire thin cowboys wearing black t-shirts take a seat a few stools down.
“Chris and Jared Wheeler, friends of Billy’s. A community college opened in the town over last spring. Makes it so we have to have more bells and whistles, but the money is plenty enough.”
A huddle of barely sober twenty year-olds in cutoff denim skirts dance by him on their way to the jukebox. A swinging length of wavy brown hair hits his arm. Marie wasn’t far from his mind, but now he’s thinking of her spinning in the den, scarf he bought her flying. Laughing over ten years of ballet lost on puberty and six years of stripper training sponsored by the school dance team.
He finishes his drink. Not a single desirable woman over twenty-five in the place. Goes to figure.
Buffalo sets down two tumblers of his best brandy. He toasts the grizzly torso mounted on his wall. “Nine years, Mother Fucker.” He turns and toasts Logan. “Nine years, Mother Fucker’s killer.”
Logan puts back the brandy with none of the old man’s coughing and wheezing. Nine years ago, he ran out of the woods like a wild man to slice off Buffalo Bill’s grandson’s arm at the shoulder. Grizzly had him below the elbow. That’s a lot of arm he could’ve saved, had he put any forethought into it. Logan always wonders if Buffalo thinks of that while he’s laying out the welcome mat. Weren’t for Buffalo himself, kid would’ve just bled out while Logan danced with the bear.
Yeah, he can go in for heroics every now and again. But he doesn’t know how anyone stomachs the messes he leaves behind.
“There been rumors up and down these parts, past couple weeks, about a mystery fight-circuit man named the Wolverine. Between you, me, and the Mother Fucker on the wall, I hear he answers to your calling card.” With a significant look as his knuckles, Buffalo refills his glass. “All these years, Logan, you never did talk much about your hobbies.”
A shrug is all Buffalo gets out of him.
“Can’t say I’ve met another fight-circuit man I could put in a half-decent word for.” He pours himself another toast. “’Course, can’t say I ever met another fight-circuit man who got himself robbed blind and taken hostage by a young gal let out on spring break.” Buffalo punctuates the crack by guzzling his brandy.
Sipping his nice and slow, the way good brandy’s meant to be taken, Logan glowers.
Buffalo’s laughter is mixed up with his coughing. “That’s just one of the versions I heard.” He swallows his hacking, wrinkled face smoothed out by curiosity. He sets his elbows, crosshatched by deep white scars, on the bar. “It’s a funny case. People from all over come here, they sit down, have a drink, get to talking about it. Fights up in Laughlin shut down. Ed Baylor keeping to his house on account of some dirty money he owes that he can’t pay until he sells off a motorcycle left in his possession.”
Christ, his 650. He doesn’t have the cash to buy it back since he has it earmarked for Marie. On top of that, he can’t risk the notice. What the hell. It fell into his lap once. Give it a quarter of a century, and he’ll probably find it again.
Buffalo continues, “Circuit fighters got their balls bunched up over mutants in their ranks. ‘It ain’t fair,’ as if the circuit’s ever been decent. We keep it out of these parts. This Wolverine fellow ought to keep himself out of it, too. He’s a marked man.”
Figured as much. He wanted to stop the way down to relieve some tension, but he thought the other way would be easier. Lust catches his notice.
The dancing girl with Marie’s color hair is ass to crotch with skinny cowboy number one, but her porn princess pout is for Logan. He takes her in. She’s taller than Marie. Longer legs and smaller breasts. Doesn’t look the type to sit herself on a man’s lap only to leap away just when he’s stopped feeling like a piece of shit for letting her.
“That’s Clara. She’s in Billy’s class at the community college. Does karaoke on Thursdays and the local boys on Fridays and Saturdays. Her daddy, Jerome O’Dell, drinks on Sundays.”
Logan flicks his attention back to Buffalo. “So what?”
Buffalo’s eyebrows go up a fraction. Introducing his patrons is just his way, like it’s Logan’s way to forget them half a second later. Usually. When he’s not so on edge.
“Sure, now. There was a young gal.” When Buffalo sees that’s a closed subject, he moves on. “There was a young gal and a sack full of cash, on top of two Mounties mauled but good by a wild thing in the woods. Like I say, it’s a funny case.” He steps away to put the brandy back on the shelf. “But you’re not here for my gossip. And you’re not here for my brandy, or to do me any favors, or even to run off with my customers’ goodtime daughters.” He limps out from behind the bar. “Come on out back.”
Buffalo leads Logan fifty feet into the woods behind the bar, where Buffalo’s psychiatrist-turned-preacher wife converted an old one-room prairie schoolhouse into a Native American Church.
“Phyllis is down in Arizona at a conference. I won’t tell her you were here.” Buffalo undoes the triple padlocks, not commenting on the part of the doorframe marked by Logan’s so-called calling card.
The light switch reveals rows and rows of legal mescaline in various states of bloom.
Buffalo lifts a small pot and examines the root carefully. “You know, you offended her when you wouldn’t let her be your spiritual guide. And last time you swore you’d given up peyotism.”
Logan feels a phantom lurch in his stomach, payback for his bender.
A decade ago, he came back from Japan more emotionally fucked up than he left, with only disordered passing memories from the experience. One year into living like he was raised by wolves – because, hell, he might’ve been – he saved three of Buffalo Bill’s grandson’s limbs from a grizzly. A healthy supply of peyote to help with his meditation brought the Zen back into Logan’s life and war back into his dreams. Small price to pay for the end of his short-term memory loss.
Then it was lumberjacking, semi driving, cage fighting. A string of women with a plenty of roughnecks already notched onto their bedposts. Building and tearing down and rebuilding and tearing up a cabin on a foundation of gut instinct and self-delusion. Trying everyway he could, pleasure or pain, to kill himself and failing at even that.
Yeah, he could remember the short-term. It added up to a big, stinking pile of bullshit.
And nothing short of remembering the long-term – before Japan: the tags and the lab and the wars – would make the here and now matter.
He still believes that, but peyote didn’t have the answers. Three years before, he paid for his supply by running out Buffalo’s sonuvabitch sheriff. Then he did what he always gets around to doing. He took it too far. In one day, he went through all the peyote Buffalo had given him for two months and had to break into the church to steal more. When his healing factor finally caught up to the mescaline, he was armpit-deep in a river with his claws sunk deep into his own neck, no memory of what he hallucinated. Only the sound of his own voice, “I’m gonna cut your goddamn head off. See if that works.”
Logan runs his tongue over his teeth. He can still taste the bitterness of the blood and vomit.
“I’ve started meditating again,” he finally answers Buffalo, which is a least a partial truth.
He and Marie have been working at it for a week now. Only neither of them have gotten much actual meditating done. If he so much as shifted while Marie’s eyes were closed, they flew open and she spent five minutes apologizing. The rest of the time, frustration all but fumed from her ears.
Inner goddamn poise, Marie, he growled this morning. “I’d be more inwardly poised if I were doing this alone,” she said, and he snorted, told her they’d tried that already and this wasn’t nap time. “It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she yelped, but he cut her off. Listen, he said. I’m not here. This house isn’t here. The world isn’t here. You’re alone in your own mind.
She rolled onto her knees. “Don’t you think I’m trying to be!” He refused to break his pose. “Tell me how, Logan,” she persisted. “Tell me how, and I’ll do it.” Attempting to exhibit calm for her, he tried to get her to see he wasn’t teaching her to change a tire. He didn’t have instructions. She huffed, “What use are you, then? You’re telling me to feel alone in the world – I’ve been alone in the world. It didn’t cleared up my mind any, believe me!” In a clipped tone, he retorted, in so many words, that maybe she liked it that way. Maybe she wanted her mutation to get the best of her. Easier than closing her eyes and sitting still with another person for fifteen damn minutes.
Marie leaned over and pushed him. Just hard enough that he’d had to catch himself and, startled, meet her stung gaze. After a long, uncomfortable moment, she sat, miserably, back into her pose. She closed her eyes, obviously concentrating very hard on not crying.
Twelve hours later, he’s in a Native American Church trying to score an hallucinogenic to calm her down. He left the cabin thinking he was doing it for her, but the kind of thoughts he’s been having about her all the way down here beg to differ.
“I think you ought to give me a little more explanation than that,” Buffalo says, cradling the pot. “Phyllis hasn’t forgiven you for last time.”
So Logan had been right to stay away so long. Used to be he came every other month, but even three years hasn’t dimmed the disgust. “I sent money.” It’s the only thing he can say in his defense.
“You frightened my grandson,” Buffalo tells him.
Billy’s curt, “My grandfather’s at the bar, Mr. Logan,” earlier was enough to tell him, even though Logan doesn’t remember it himself, Billy certainly hasn’t forgotten.
“He saw you out in the woods. Then he saw you again, breaking into to the church. Losing a hero is a hard thing for a boy.”
More snappishly than he intended, Logan says, “I told you then I never meant to do harm to your family. If I ain’t welcome now, say so.”
“You’ll never hear me say that.” Buffalo studies him. “But you’re not entirely sure you want this medicine, and because of that I’m not entirely sure I want to give it to you. You’re back on your past, I’d wager.”
“I ain’t tryin’ that again.”
“You saying you aren’t interested in the rumors the Wolverine man with the claws has kicked up?”
Logan stills.
“I see. You’re saying you haven’t heard them.” Buffalo puts the pot back down. “People might not remember your face, but they aren’t liable to forget those claws.”
“What people?”
“No actual people. Rumor. One man’s second cousin’s wife’s brother, or the like. There was a fight, up near High Level, back when it was barely a truck stop. Tore up a bar. Man had something like knives or bones coming out his knuckles. Know anything about that?”
Bar fight more than fifteen years ago near High Level. Doesn’t spark a flash. But if rumors can be even partially believed, it sounds enough like him that maybe he’s been right to stick around the area like a lost dog all these years. Maybe the cabin is his.
All the more reason to get back to it as soon as possible.
Buffalo picks up a different pot. “In a few days or so, this one’ll be ready enough. Give you a chance to think.”
He takes it without comment. He starts toward the ’72 GMC pickup he got on a steal for one of his bikes before Buffalo has the first padlock in place.
“Why ‘Wolverine’?” Buffalo calls out in the semi-darkness.
Logan doesn’t pause. “’Cause they’re warm and fuzzy.”
“You don’t have to explain the resemblance. Forgive an old Indian a story, but there’s one about a spirit called the wolverine and his lover, the moon – ”
“I’ve heard it,” Logan cuts Buffalo off. “Don’t worry about seeing me again.”
It isn’t until he goes to turn on the ignition that he realizes his hands are aching under the skin, and he can’t remember who told him that story. What Logan does remember is the ending. The part about the moon betraying the wolverine after tricking him into happiness.
He follows the full moon back to his cabin. Twenty different times, he almost pulls into some dive or another, hoping to find a guy who knows a guy who saw a wild man once upon a time. Or hoping to find a fight or a fuck. All of the above.
But he makes the drive without stopping. The peyote root sits beside him, where Marie wanted to be. She knew she couldn’t be seen with him, though she still put up a hell of a fight. The part for the water heater he told her he had to get – the part he could’ve gone a few months without – clanks around in the truck bed.
Logan surprises himself by turning on the radio. The one in his old pickup hadn’t even worked. The flips impatiently through a bunch of crap before stopping on a crackling Neil Young song that keeps him thinking about Marie. So he goes back to sound of the engine, only the drone isn’t as soothing as it used to be.
Thing is, Buffalo wasn’t wrong when he saw that Logan is torn over the peyote. When used in the right state of mind, it induces and enhances meditation. Abuse it and…well, he’s seen the consequences of that. He didn’t really think about how Marie would take to it or whether she’d take it all before he set out for Buffalo Bill’s. He just wanted to be of some use.
That’s a lot of bull. He wants a shortcut. Meditation can help Marie, he knows it, and he’s tried everyway he can think of to show her, short of loading her up drugs hoping she’ll float.
If he gives her the peyote, Marie will probably take it. He’s already shoved meditation so far down her throat that she’s snapped, yet she hasn’t walked away. She’s letting him push it on her, he thinks, as a trade-off for letting her push her flirtation on him. Marie’s bold enough to plant her butt on his lap and demand a backrub. She’s even bold enough to let the pretext slip and her knees fall open.
But she’s not bold enough to let herself – or him – get any satisfaction out of it. Not even through layers of fabric. He hasn’t seen so much as a bare finger since that day he walked in on her getting herself off in the bathtub. Her hot-cold act is wearing thin, especially since he knows exactly what she gets up to when she disappears into her room. It’s damnation just smelling it on her.
Smelling himself on her, though, that’s a whole different circle of hell. And he always thinks, after she springs away, if she would hurry up and stop being so damned skittish he could stop imagining all the nauseating things that could’ve happened to her to make her so afraid.
It’s past late by the time he enters the dark and silent cabin with the peyote. He can imagine himself tomorrow – Hey, kid, brought you a gift. Get high, and then try to get on me again. We’ll both have a better time. Never had to think of drugging a woman to keep her willing before.
And that’s the better alternative. The peyote is meant to help her relax, but under these fucked up circumstances it’s just as likely to do the opposite. Now that he’s actually got his hands on it, he’s more worried about finding her in a couple days at bottom of the cliff he just drove up.
The fuck is wrong with him? He should throw the damn peyote out.
He’s got better things to think about. Like the fact that his connection to this place finally has a rational basis. At least one person in a bar full of people remembers him, the man he was before fifteen years ago. The bar-brawling man he was. Not much has changed.
Logan leaves the peyote root on the mantle, exchanging it for the samurai sword. Holding this in his hand, that’s what makes him feel like there’s a different man somewhere inside of him. Honor and dignity and composure – a bunch of crap, once you get right down to it. Doesn’t stop the respect he feels for this sword, though, or him wanting a little of it to rub off on the swordsman.
He gives a few test-swings, does a few simple steps, and then puts the blade back on its mount. He had his chance for all of that in Japan. There was a reason he had to leave that man behind – a woman whose face he used to picture when he meditated. He doesn’t think he’d recognize her now.
There’s an even more forgotten woman who belongs to this cabin. Her clothes are probably molding in the box in the storage room now. He left them where he found them, in the right side of the drawer, for the longest time. The clothes that fit him – that are his, he should just get used to that – were folded in the left side. That said a lot. ’Course, whoever she was, she never came for her things. She’s better off or six feet under, and he hasn’t thought about either alternative since he shoved all her shit in the back years ago.
Anyhow. Could be something salvageable. Marie might like something different to wear. He takes the peyote with him, figuring he’ll see how it fares in the storage room until he has to make a decision about it.
The open stairs to Marie’s room makes him pause. He listens for her breathing, hearing only the slight breeze coming through what must be the open window hatch. The thought of her gone takes him halfway up the stairs, where he catches her scent.
“Marie, what the hell you doin’ up on the roof this time of night?”
A hasty scramble, then she calls out, “You can come up!”
He puts the pot outside the window and hoists himself onto the roof. Marie smiles sheepishly and scoots over for him. He’s swinging his legs over when he notices that she’s wearing a blanket and nothing else.
Logan settles in carefully beside her. She has her eyes closed, her chin titled toward the moon. He’s looking for clues for how to play this one.
Finally, he takes off his jacket, balls it up behind his head, and rolls up his sleeves. “You’re right,” he says, stretching out. “Practically balmy out here.”
A gust kicks up, making her shiver and laugh. She slips her foot out of the blanket and nudges his leg. Her bare calf makes him think of her in the tub again. He easies his left ankle over his right.
“I didn’t expect you back tonight.”
“I believe it. If I’d have known you were a closet nudist, I would’ve gone and – ”
“High-tailed it for the hills?”
“ – come back early more often.”
She half-smiles on the left, so he can’t see it.
He tries again. “Maybe made a quieter entrance.”
“Wouldn’t that have been a shock? I might’ve fallen off the roof.”
“I might’ve fallen off the roof.” Logan smirks. “Might’ve been worth it.”
There’s the full smile. “So worth it.”
They leave it at that for a long moment. It’s a cool night, clear and active. An owl swoops down on a mouse.
“So what are you doin’, Marie? Communing with nature?”
“I was inspired by the moon. I thought maybe I was more of a nighttime meditator. And then I thought if I could forget the cold…” She lets out a pretty little sigh. “Mostly I just turned blue.”
The blanket slips off her shoulder. The way she’s sitting, she’ll have to flash him to fix it.
“Lemme get that,” Logan says, and waits for her to tilt her neck before he tugs it over her collarbone. His hand brushes the ends of her hair. She keeps herself very still. He runs his hand over the blanket, following the curve of her side. Her expression remains determinedly flat.
Logan drops his hand and rolls off his side. She breathes deeply, a cloud of cold air coming out of her nostrils.
“S’pose since you’re freezing your ass off, it’s a good time to tell you I got some more clothes for you to wear. If you wash ’em first.”
“Ew,” she replies, nose wrinkled. Primly, she adds, “I don’t want whatever’s been rolling around your truck bed, thanks.”
Touch of the betrayed there. Grates on his ears like always. So she didn’t buy the water heater excuse. She thinks he was out getting laid. It would’ve been a good thing – as decent a thing as someone like him can manage – for both of them if he had.
“Ain’t like that. Box of stuff in the back I forgot about, don’t know whose it is.”
“Oh.” After a second, her grimace clears.
Hell. Again, would’ve been kinder to let her go on thinking what she was thinking about him. He’s never given her false expectations of his character before, so he sure as shit shouldn’t start doing it now. Not with all that fatal, milky skin of hers open to the elements just inches away.
He gives it a little more time.
“You can open your eyes now.”
Marie keeps them resolutely closed. “Everything’s a competition with you.” Exactly sixty seconds later, her lashes flutter open. “Sixteen minutes,” she states, letting her obvious, “I win,” go unsaid.
“Hate to be a dick – ”
That elicits a snort.
“ – but counting ain’t exactly meditating.”
“I wasn’t counting before you came,” she says, rocking herself a little for warmth. “I was trying to be calm and serene. Like my muse, the moon.” Marie tosses back her hair. “Bitch makes it look so easy. But…” She rests her chin on her shoulder so she can look at him. “I guess I’m stuck being the sun. All that conflict and thermonuclear fusion…until one day – poof – I’m all burnt up.” Her mouth takes a self-mocking curve.
He shuts his eyes and puts his aching hands behind his head. “Moon can’t be all it’s cracked up to be, kid.”
“Hm. ‘Kid.’”
Guess that remark came out dismissive.
“What’s that?” she asks, obviously just noticing his degenerate excuse for a present.
“Peyote root.”
“How unexpectedly New Agey of you.” Her tone is one of confusion.
“Helps with meditation.”
“Ah.” After a long minute, Marie starts shivering in earnest. “Peyote. That’s like LSD, isn’t it? Mescaline?”
“Yeah.”
She gets to her feel, and he tries to see up her blanket as she steps over him.
“I know you’re trying to help me, so thanks.”
“But?”
The sound of the pot cracking on the hard snow below answers his question. Shit. He didn’t even think about Southaven’s fucking try-anything approach.
“I hope that wasn’t expensive,” she says as an afterthought, shifting from foot to foot on the cold shingles. “Sorry.”
Logan sits up. “Don’t be. You know what’s best for you.”
“I choose my own treatments now.”
“That’s right.”
“But I don’t want you thinking I’m not trying.”
“I know you are. I’m a dick.”
“I know you are,” Marie echoes, lips forming a smile. The smile. The he’s-in-for-it smile. “But mine’s worse – ”
She squeezes her eyes shut and opens her blanket with a self-conscious, self-liberating shriek. He barely gets an eyeful of ice-hard nipple before she’s clutching it closed.
“I’m a tease,” she manages through her nervy grin, and scurries through the skylight.
His head drops heavily, missing his coat and hitting the roof with a ringing thunk. Below, Marie’s laughing. Clearly proud of herself.
Fuck. Almighty.
Logan rearranges his jacket behind his head. He’s getting what he deserves, at least. That was a shit thing he tried to do to her, and she actually assumed he meant the gesture to help anybody other than himself. Heart of gold kid.
He thinks of her in five years, behind the counter of some greasy, side-of-the-road kind of place. In a burnt out tone he won’t recognize, she’ll say, “Let me get you another waitress, Mr. Logan.”
As for now, she can torture him all she likes, and he’ll try not to enjoy it too much. Preemptive payback for that mess.
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