Meet Me in the Moon Room (20 page)

Doing Time

W
e congregate in the weeds and broken bottles of the vacant lot across from the court-house this summer evening, and I whip my cadre of hardcore troops into a revolutionary frenzy.

We build a big fire of rotten boards and old tires. A crowd gathers. We circle the fire, chanting uplifting slogans and waving tiny American flags. We toss the flags in the fire. A fight breaks out.

A riot squad fills the air with tear gas and rubber bullets, and before I can slip away, a chubby man with rosy cheeks, a neat brown suit, and a .357 Magnum tells me his name is Special Officer Mallory. He wants me to put up my hands.

My trial is speedy and mostly by phone. I’m sentenced to five years, and I spend it locked up in a shed behind a classic ranch house on Willow Street. A guy named Louie owns the house. He’s picked up my contract.

Louie likes to hose me off before meals. What that means is he pulls out his shriveled pink dong and pees all over me where I’m tied to a folding metal cot.

“You stupid son of a bitch, Louie,” I tell him. “Don’t you know you’ll be the prisoner some day? Everyone slips up. You never know. I just might pick up your contract, next time.”

“Oh, no, John.” He shivers dramatically. “Wouldn’t that be terrible!” If Louie had a tail he’d be wagging it. Stupid son of a bitch. Food’s good though, and Louie takes me out on a long rope every day to play in the yard. Could be worse.

Louie cries real tears when they make him let me go.

So what I do after leaving Louie is photograph the flag and make about a dozen copies on the machine in the court-house. A bunch of people see me do that. I’ve got an attitude, and I’m getting a bad reputation. Someone tips off Mallory and he’s in the crowd a little later, around my fire, where I burn the copies of the photograph of the flag. Confusion ripples through the crowd. People step forward; people step back. They can’t decide if this is sufficient provocation for a riot. Finally, though, someone takes the initiative and throws a punch. One thing leads to another. Cars get tipped over; windows get broken; stores get looted. I get arrested. Mallory takes care of that personally.

I spend three days handcuffed to the door of his car while the Supreme Court, our legacy of the Reagan Bush Quayle Bush years, deliberates. They decide burning any likeness of the flag is covered by the law. I spend seven years chained to a shopping cart following a derelict named Bob around the city, there being by this time more prisoners than foster guards with buildings. Bob, who shuffles along with enough room in his baggy pants for an extra butt, mostly ignores me as he pushes his cart from place to place, and much as I hate to say it, I miss Louie. At least he talked to me. We sleep in doorways. The money Bob gets for me buys him a steady supply of fortified wine but not much food. I lose a lot of weight.

When my time is up, I bully Bob into pushing us down to the police station where they let me go. “I hope you learned your lesson,” the desk sergeant says.

Sure. What I do is get a red marking pen and tear a white bed sheet into flag size and write the words “US flag” on it. Then I burn it. Since I’m TV news by now, the violence is truly spectacular. The underclass neighborhoods, that is to say, maybe ninety percent of the city, are alive with the sound of gunfire, alight with fierce fires gleaming in broken glass. Cars like toppled dead bugs litter the streets.

From the look on Mallory’s face, I can tell I’m beginning to piss him off. He drags me into the basement of police headquarters and turns me over to a man in a dirty white lab coat who tells me his name is Dr. Paul. Dr. Paul wants me to take the newly legislated Good Citizen Test. I’d been hoping to avoid that.

I tell him to hide his test in a dark and smelly, but extremely personal, place.

“I’m authorized to shoot you for being uncooperative during the test,” he says.

“And what if I take the test, and you decide I’m a socialist or that I have homosexual tendencies or that I can read or something?”

“Then I’m authorized to shoot you,” he says.

Just to see what happens, I tell Dr. Paul what it feels like to burn a flag.

“Ah, ha!” He jumps up and whips out a recorder he’s had hidden under his greasy coat. “That’ll cost you another five years!”

He finally gets his breathing under control and calms down enough to read me the questions on the Good Citizen Test. What I do is pretend I’m Mallory as I answer the questions. I just keep asking myself, “How would Special Officer Mallory answer this question?”

I pass the test. That doesn’t please Mallory, who gets really steamed and red in the face, but then Dr. Paul gives him the tape, and that cheers him up.

The Judge is in full agreement that five years ought to be tacked onto my latest sentence—five years for causing an uncooperative idea to become lodged in another citizen’s mind.

Mallory asks to pick up my contract himself, saying that since he’s arrested me so many times for basically the same crime, my former jailers must not have properly applied all available modern rehabilitation techniques. He wants a shot at it himself. Sounds like a good idea to me, says the Judge. So I go home with Mallory.

A cockroach is doing enthusiastic pushups on my nose. Being chained to the clammy, cold dungeon wall of Mallory’s basement, I can’t do much about it.

Turns out I’m not Mallory’s only prisoner. I shouldn’t be surprised, what with maybe half the population at any given time being prisoners. Her name is Connie.

“So whatcha in for, Connie?”

“Missing church too many Sundays in a row,” she says.

I’ve never been locked up with a woman before. In fact, it occurs to me that it’s been years and years since I spent any time at all with a woman. She’s skinny with ragged blond hair, and she’s pretty grimy. Early thirties, I guess. I think she’s beautiful. Heaven, I decide, is being locked up in a small airless place with a dirty woman.

Nothing’s ever perfect, though. We strain against our chains and whisper all the nasty things we’d do to one another if we could touch. I wonder if all these years of confinement could be doing something to my basic human dignity.

Oh, Connie!

I’m in love.

A couple of days later she asks me, “So what are you thinking, John?”

I tell her I’m visualizing burning the Stars and Stripes.

The door bursts open and Mallory rushes in. “I heard that! I heard that!” he shouts. “This’ll be life, John. At long last, I’ll take you off the streets for good.”

I resent his interruption. “You can’t get me for just visualizing it, Mallory,” I say.

“No? Hold that thought.” Mallory dials his portable phone. “Get me the Supreme Court,” he says and listens. I can see him nodding and hear him muttering, and a few minutes later, he jams down the phone antenna. “Turns out I can.”

Doesn’t matter too much, I decide. I’ll spend the years smelling Connie.

But Mallory unchains her, helps her stand. “Nice work, Sergeant,” he tells her.

She gives me a mean smile and calls me an old fart.

They leave me alone in the dark.

I get real discouraged, and I wonder if maybe I’m just pissing into the wind.

The Next Best Thing

Y
ou’ve got to discipline your tattoos regularly. Otherwise, they get lazy or uppity—one or the other. I’d set aside the afternoon before Christmas for that purpose, and I was drinking beer and sneaking up on the screaming eagle under my left arm when someone tapped on my door. I put on my mild-mannered-account-executive persona, pulled on my pants and got into my bathrobe.

When I opened the door, I saw Deborah standing there looking good in jeans and western checked shirt, blond hair tied up in a ponytail. Yes, good but sad, too, since it had only been I forget how many days since Tim died.

“I need your help,” she said.

I groaned. This had to be about Tim’s last request. Everyone knew what he expected his friends to do should he be cruelly snatched away by Death.

“Come on, Deborah,” I said. “They’ll never let you have him.” I was already making up excuses, because I figured what she probably wanted was help stealing his body from the funeral home.

“Oh, that,” she said. “He’s already in the trunk of my car.”

I had met Deborah and Tim at a motivation seminar in Florida several years before. He was the cadaverous ex-astronaut (so the story went) and she was his sci-fi sweetie. Our two worlds were quite different but they seemed to compliment one another pretty well. We became fast friends, a threesome, sometimes a foursome, usually a threesome, so when she looked at me with those deep brown eyes and said, come on I really really really do need you, I changed my clothes and we went.

Tim’s last wish had been that his remains be shot into space. I didn’t think there was much danger we’d be doing that this rainy afternoon.

Deborah drove well, if a little too fast, out of town and into the Oregon countryside on a road I knew led nowhere but farm country. What could she have in mind?

“The downside to death,” she said, “is that it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.”

I waited for her to fill me in on the upside.

“The upside,” she said, “is that you do that one last thing forever.”

I thought she had it backwards, but I didn’t say so.

Deborah, Deborah.

I wondered how she’d gotten Tim’s long body into the truck of her car. Weren’t dead people supposed to be stiff? She’d waltzed Tim out of the funeral home right under the noses of whoever was holding down the fort the day before Christmas. She was easy to underestimate. You might, for example, get stinking drunk one night when Tim was out of town and call her Debby, maybe even complain that Debby Does Diddly, but you’d only do it once. She was a woman with edges so sharp you even dream about them, you wake up bleeding.

“Will you pay attention?” she said. I realized she’d been talking to me for some time. “Here. We’re coming up on it now.”

Up ahead was a big white sign—billboard size. I couldn’t make it out. Words. A picture. We got closer. I still couldn’t make it out. We stopped. “You’ll have to open the gate,” she said.

I got out and looked up at the sign. It said, “Manvil The Magnificent! Big Breasted Birds.” The picture was a happy hayseed hooking a thumb over his shoulder at a grinning steroid turkey.

“Up here a ways,” she said when I got back in the car, “we’ll have to be very, very quiet.”

“Why? Are we hunting wabbits?”

She rolled her eyes at me.

The road snaked through deep forest for a while, and then I could see light ahead indicating we would soon be breaking into the open, but before we got there, Deborah turned off the main road. We slowly skirted the edge of the forest until she found what she was looking for. When we came out of the trees, there was a small hill, little more than a bump, in the middle of a field of what must have once been corn. On top of the hill was a smokestack.

Deborah turned off the engine. “The house,” she whispered, “is only a few hundred yards beyond the hill. We’ll need to be careful.”

I assumed she meant the house of the magnificent turkey farmer, Manvil. She got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Then she eased open the back door and nodded me over. “Help me unload.”

I helped her carry boxes and rope and things I couldn’t identify up the hill. Something about the smokestack pulled at my mind. I almost had it as I set down each load and turned to go back for another. When we’d unloaded everything and I was taking a moment near the top of the hill to catch my breath, the pieces fell into place.

That was no smokestack!

It was a big gun. A cannon, in fact, but hugely exaggerated like something you’d see in a circus.

“Now we wait for dark,” Deborah said. “Come on, let’s crawl up by the cannon and take a look at the house.”

We moved up on the circus cannon but dropped to our knees before we reached it. I could see it had once been painted red, white, and blue. Now it was rusting in a corn field. Near the top of the hill we got down on our bellies and crawled up and looked over.

In the meadow below there was a farmhouse, a red barn, and a white silo. Set away from those buildings were several sheds surrounded by chicken-wire fences. There were many turkeys in the pens, so many turkeys I wondered if Manvil the Magnificent had sold any at all this holiday season.

Everything was a lot closer than I’d expected.

Deborah scanned the scene through a pair of powerful binoculars.

“There’s something seriously wrong with those turkeys.” She handed me the binoculars.

I studied the turkeys. They did seem to be bigger and bustier than I remembered turkeys being, but I couldn’t see anything to worry about. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Are you blind?” She gave me a look. “They have arms. Obviously Manvil has reached back in time somehow and crossed his turkeys with their ancient ancestors. In his drive to minimize wing and maximize breast, he has turned them into creatures half modern table bird and half ancient dinosaur. T-rex would be my guess.”

I looked again. No arms. This was just another example of what happened when our two very different worlds touched but didn’t exactly mesh.

Or maybe she was just yanking my chain.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Arms.”

“Our window will be very small,” she said. “We’ll have to wait until it’s just dark enough that they won’t see us unless they’re looking right at us, but not so dark we can’t see what we’re doing.”

“How will we know?” I asked.

“Look,” she said. “You can see into the living room. When they turn on the Christmas tree, conditions should be optimal.”

I looked through the binoculars again. Yes, I could see the Christmas tree. And a woman in an apron. She seemed to be talking to someone I couldn’t see, probably a child down under the tree where the presents would be.

A man with a huge handlebar mustache came up behind the woman and put his hands on her shoulders. A moment later the Christmas tree lights came on, and a small girl poked her head up, smiling.