Free Red Moon by Benjamin Percy Page A

onto the counter—and when she has finished paying, nearly a third of her money spent, she says thank you in a voice that needs a glass of water.
    She heads toward town, the cluster of buildings and trees a half mile down the road, the only variation in a landscape otherwise sprawling with corn and soybeans. This is the kind of country, her father used to say, where you could watch your dog run away for three days. Used to say. Because he wouldn’t say again. He wouldn’t say anything ever again. Neither would her mother. The dead didn’t speak. She knows she will never see them again.
    The day is warming up and she is thankful when she steps into the shade thrown by the knuckly oak trees lining this main street, the older Victorian and Colonial homes set back on browning lawns. The occasional car whooshes by, but otherwise, it seems like a quiet place, where nothing horrible could ever happen. The houses are soon replaced by small businesses. Next to a steepled church sits a small park with paths running through it and a play structure in its center. The trees are big here, some of their gnarled branches as wide as a man’s middle. She circles them, collecting several smaller branches knocked down by the wind. Two girls in bright floral dresses play on the swings while their mother watches. At a nearby picnic table, an older woman, dressed in black rags, rocks back and forth, the town crazy. Claire finds a bench and scares off a squirrel before taking a seat. Out of her bag she pulls the ibuprofen. She pinches the bottle between her thighs and clumsily pulls off the cap, then punches through the foil and washes down three pills with a gulp of Coke.
    Next she withdraws a wolf T-shirt and duct tape. She takes off her jacket and slides back her shirtsleeve to the elbow. Over her arm she pulls the T-shirt, a child’s small, running her thumb through a sleeve and her fingers through the neck, flopping the shirt over several times, wrapping the material tight around her arm.
    She then lays the sticks across her forearm, two of them pressed tightly together, hoping to make a splint. But when she reaches for the duct tape, her arm wobbles and the sticks fall out of place. And when she tries the duct tape, using her fingers, and then her teeth, to unpeel a long strip of tape, she only ends up tearing and twisting it. “Damn it,” she says and almost hurls the tape away to strike a squirrel or robin. It’s heavy in her hand, as though made of metal, and she bets it could do some damage. That might make her feel better.
    Instead she looks around for help. The mother and her children are already gone, the girls skipping down a distant sidewalk, which leaves the old woman sitting ten yards away, staring off into nothing, rocking back and forth as though lost in the rhythm of a prayer.
    “Excuse me,” Claire says. The woman makes no response, so she yells this time, “Excuse me!”
    The woman goes still and glances in Claire’s direction. She could be fifty or could be seventy—it is hard to tell. Her hair is dishwater gray and cut choppily around her ears, her skin deeply wrinkled from too much sun. Claire says, “I need some help. Can you help me?”
    The woman nods and mutters something under her breath, then rises with some difficulty and totters like a vulture over to where Claire sits. An unwashed smell comes off her. Her eyes appear filmed completely over with cataracts. And her smile, if that’s what it is, has holes in it from her missing teeth. “Need help,” she says, her voice like a rusty hinge. “I can help. What help do you need? Tell me. Tell me.”
    “What’s your name?”
    The woman says her name is Strawhacker, Ms. Strawhacker, and Claire addresses her as such and explains what to do, how to slowly spin the duct tape around the splint, beginning at her elbow, moving forward to her wrist, finally knotting it between her thumb and forefinger.
    “Why not a doctor?” The woman, Strawhacker, touches