Blood on the Moon
I was staying in a worn-out motel in Montmagny, a small town on the St. Lawrence River downstream from Quebec City. Vents a serieux, the TV weather channel warned me grimly. I was scheduled to take a small car ferry out to L’Isle Aux Grues next morning. I wondered if the ferry — le bateau to the locals — would sail. This was the iffy part of Quebec autumn with bitter winter sneaking closer day by day.
I keep starting awake out of strange dreams with echoes of my own snores in my ears. At some point I must have changed channels. The next time I noticed the TV,an international beauty contest was wrapping up, won by an American brunette. I switched back to the muted weather channel, and listened to serious winds prowl outside.
The night before, I had seen a blood-red moon from Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City. It weighed on my mind. On the hotel promenade, high above the St Lawrence, I told my companions my Georgia grandmother’s old superstition that blood on the moon meant somebody will die soon.
Carol from Tacoma, Washington, said, wryly, “Well of course somebody will die soon somewhere. Somebody dies every night somewhere.”
“She meant someone you know,” replied Maryanne from Iowa, as if she had known my grandmother.
So I told them about the first time I saw blood on the moon, and heard my grandmother’s eerie prediction. Visible from the sleeping porch of our beach house, a fat red moon had risen from the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean and perched above a crimson-tinged path across the restless sea. A chill had run up my spine. Fox running across your grave, my grandmother called it. That was the night a seafood cook in love with my waitress mother shot a cab driver to death because he insulted her.
“See?” Maryanne said. “I knew it! I hope it’s not somebody we know tonight. At least not in Tijuana. I’ve got your buddies shopping for a leather flight jacket for you like the fifty-dollar one I wouldn’t let you buy when we were down there last year.”
Jackets like that cost four or five times as much in the States. But, bargain shopper sans pareil, she had tried to knock the price down by asking how we could tell it wasn’t vinyl, not leather. The Mexican seller affected outrage. But the doubt she raised made me refuse the sale. Carol, with a smattering of Spanish, heard him tell other vendors I was dominated by my bitch of a wife. The two women had great fun telling me that.
Maryanne being Maryanne, a year later she tried to make amends by telling the California Highway Patrol guys who hosted our San Diego conference she would pay for a jacket if they found me one. They had gone across last night. Tijuana could be dangerous, especially for the unarmed. Under Mexican law even cops had to leave their pistols north of the border. After she connected their shopping trip to the blood on a Quebec moon, I breathed a secret sigh of relief when there was no bad news from CHP the day I left for Montmagny. (Or good news; they couldn’t find a Size 54 Long leather bomber jacket at any price.)
As I trudged blearily through gray predawn from visitor’s parking toward the small car ferry, it bobbed uneasily under pummeling vents a serieux. We would sail into the teeth of the storm. I had a thought I wished I hadn’t. Maybe the blood on the moon was for me.
