Meet Me in the Moon Room Read online

  “I guess we’re coming up on T-minus something,” I said.

  “Yes,” Deborah said. She walked back to the bottom of the cannon.

  “All systems go?” I asked.

  She gave me a thumbs up.

  Then she did something to the cannon and there was a tremendous wompf.

  Tim flew from the end of the cannon and over the turkey pens.

  “Uh oh,” I said.

  He’d been basically rolled into a ball when he left the end of the gun, but now his arms and legs unfurled, and he turned gracefully in the air just in time to splat face first into the big picture window of the farm house.

  “Here comes Santa Claus,” I said.

  Deborah sprang into action. She grabbed my arm. “Come on!”

  “Circle the wagons, Mildred,” I babbled as she dragged me to the car. “The hippies are shooting dead people at us!”

  So we were on the lam, I thought. Soon there would be road blocks, troops, police barricades. They’d be grabbing everyone within fifty miles of the turkey farm. They’d pen us up in camps until it was time for questioning—barbed wire and spotlights crossing and recrossing the dusty exercise yards. They’d line us up and some mean-looking cop with a bullhorn would shout, “Okay, who did it? Somebody better speak up.”

  He’d give us a moment to think it over. Then he’d turn loose the information-sniffing dogs, and there would be no way Deborah or I could hide the facts.

  “Where are you going?” I shouted when I realized that she wasn’t fleeing the scene but was instead driving past the turkey pens and into the farmer’s front yard.

  “Splashdown,” she said. “We’ll be in and out of there before they know what’s happening. Get ready.” She stood on the breaks, and the car swerved to a screaming stop. She was out of the car and running for the house before I could even get my door open.

  I arrived just in time to hear her say, “Stand back! We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

  I stepped through the broken window. The Christmas tree had been hurled against the wall. Tim was still hugging it. Mrs. Manvil was on her knees holding on tight to the girl. You could see the family resemblance—wide eyes and slack, astonished mouths. Manvil himself stood over them, but I couldn’t see his mouth under the big mustache.

  I peeled Tim off the Christmas tree.

  “We’ll notify the authorities,” Deborah said. “You folks just hang tight. What a thing to happen on Christmas Eve! Boy, the Lord sure does move in mysterious ways.”

  I thought she sounded a little hysterical, but maybe that was part of her plan. I dragged Tim through the window and across the yard to the car. Deborah backed out after me making stay-back and keep-calm motions with both hands at the Manvils.

  I slammed the trunk on Tim and ran around and jumped in the shotgun seat. Deborah peeled out.

  When we passed the Dairy Queen, she said, “Mission accomplished.”

  “Deborah, Deborah,” I said, “do you really believe we just shot Tim into space?”

  “Sadly, no,” she said, “but we did do the next best thing.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We shot him at space.”

  Her grin made my heart ache.

  We stopped by her place to get Tim a change of clothes. Then we drove back to the funeral home.

  “It’s about time!” shouted the young guy who answered the bell. His attitude answered my question about how Deborah had gotten Tim out in the first place. Inside help.

  “My God!” he said when he saw Tim. “What did you do to him?”

  “Never mind,” Deborah said. “Look, I brought new clothes.”

  We got Tim settled on his metal table.

  She put a hand on the young man’s arm. “I know you’ll make him look good.”

  We left.

  And Tim did look pretty good the next day at the funeral.

  Deborah and I walked arm in arm past the casket.

  “He looks a little squashed in the face,” I whispered.

  “It’s the g-force,” she said. “Look at him go!”

  Beastly Heat

  The fact that the Dejorans looked a lot like humans hit Frank hard when he parted his living room curtains and turned his binoculars on the house across the street and saw the woman sitting on her screened porch, right out in the open where anyone who walked by could see her. He lowered the binoculars and knuckled his eyes in amazement.

  Bees buzzed in the honeysuckle summer air, and Frank put another salty soda cracker covered with peanut butter and honey into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, brushed crumbs from the front of his shirt, then put the binoculars back to his eyes and used the little ribbed roller to refine his focus.

  If the woman had been human, she’d be a few years younger than Frank, maybe middle to late thirties. She wore a sleeveless white dress with big yellow flowers. Her brown hair looked damp as if she’d been misting herself to keep cool. She had a dreamy smile that gave her face a lazy summer look—just a pretty woman sitting on the porch some late July afternoon sipping lemonade and watching the world go by.

  Frank wasn’t fooled. It was the creature growing out of her shoulder that tipped him off. Joined twins. The big one looked like a woman. The little green one looked like nothing human. She offered her small companion a sip of lemonade. She seemed to be talking to it, sharing a secret.

  He wished he could hear her voice, but she was a million miles away. More than a million. It all made sense suddenly. She was light-years away. The reason the woman could so openly show herself on her screened porch was that she was not on Earth at all. Somehow Frank had managed to defeat the void and peek across an interstellar distance to see this Dejoran woman talking to her second head. That had to be it. The universe was a place where even a self-educated scientist could figure things out, where solutions were possible, where nothing was unknowable, where logic ruled.

  The Dejoran woman had nice eyes. He doubted she could see him across the galaxy without an instrument, but who knew about those alien eyes? The fact that she did see him hit home when she raised her right hand palm out like she was telling traffic to stop and then wiggled her fingers at him. She grinned across all that unimaginable distance, slapping him down and letting him fall in love as only a Terran with binoculars can, and being in love, he could see clearly that her little green head was looking at him, too, really looking, and he decided he loved her tiny twin as well. It was part of her charm. One of the million little things that made her who she was.

  He had to get to her somehow.

  Frank put his binoculars aside to do some serious noodling. Rocket ships were riddled with problems, not the least of which was he didn’t have one. Could he project his mind across the void? He chuckled to himself. Astral projection was nonsense. On the other hand, he had recently been toying with the idea that Zeno’s paradox of motion could be most elegantly resolved by postulating that the reason motion is impossible is that you are already everywhere. That is, if you are everywhere, the notion of motion is meaningless. So perhaps getting to the Dejoran woman was merely a matter of convincing himself that he was already there. Frank closed his eyes.

  He pictured her porch. He imagined himself in front of her steps. He watched himself lift a foot and set it down on the first cracked wooden step. He felt himself rise as he pulled his weight up onto that foot. He opened his eyes. He was still sitting in his own living room.

  Frank sighed. He picked up his binoculars and peered across at the love of his life, afraid suddenly that she would be gone. She was still there. But for how long? He jumped up and paced around the room looking for a travel plan.

  Okay, how about geometry? As a person of scientific leanings, he would never be able to convince himself that he was already where he wanted to be. He needed to tric
k himself, and the best method for that was to apply more theory. Good. So the way to make two apparent places become one apparent place was to arrange the accouterments of the first place in such a way that it resonated with the second place; then the illusion of separateness would dissolve and the two places would seem to vibrate together. Geometry.

  Frank spent some time pushing his furniture around the room, trying first one pattern then another. He rearranged the pictures on the walls. Nothing happened. Maybe he should roll up the rug?

  Frank leaned against the wall to catch his breath. The necessary relationships among the objects at his place were obviously too subtle for him to stumble upon. He would have to resort to brute force. He would have to walk.

  It would be a difficult journey. He would need protection against solar radiation. Frank opened his front hall closet and dug out his Greek fisherman’s cap and put it on his head. He considered taking the binoculars, but the neck strap had broken years ago, and he decided he’d rather have both hands free to maneuver.

  He checked all the windows. Who knew how long he’d be gone? He stepped out onto his porch, locked the front door, then jiggled the knob just to make sure. Once, twice, three times. Things could fool you.

  He stood for a moment looking across the street. If he squinted his eyes a little he could actually see the wavering space/time warp. It appeared to be just to this side of the street. He couldn’t tell how thick it was. Maybe he would simply be on her planet when he stepped through it. Not likely. There would probably be some distance of weirdness to traverse. Frank pulled the bill of his cap down a little and stepped off his porch and walked down the path to the street.

  Up close he could see billions and billions of sparkling stars scattered across the hot pebbly surface of the road. Looking more closely, he saw the oily blackness of the street gave way to the purer, harder blackness of space. He lifted his right foot and held it suspended over the abyss, hesitant to make that first step, afraid that if he fell, he would fall forever.

  Before putting his foot down, Frank glanced up to see the Dejoran woman watching him. She’d gotten to her feet, and now she beckoned to him, like a siren without a song. A drop of sweat ran down his side and he shivered.

  Frank let his foot fall. He felt his body tingle as he passed through the hole in the universe. It was like walking on glass, like walking on an invisible roof over everything. Frank took another step then jumped back. Something he could clearly identify as the planet Saturn and as a station wagon rushed by him and screamed off into the void. More correctly, Frank thought, he had just screamed past Saturn.

  He looked both ways for other planets, then hurried to the yellow line that marked the absolute boundary between the two worlds. He stopped for a moment to consider. Did he really want to do this? Could things ever be the same after this? Wouldn’t this journey change him in some fundamental way? He looked back across the hell of space and time that he had just crossed. He thought of the Dejoran woman. He had to reach her. There was no turning back.

  Frank came to her atmosphere and jumped out of the interstellar blackness and onto the sidewalk. He glanced up at the day star, and then, with dazzled eyes, looked at her pink grass. He stumbled up her walk and stood before her porch.

  “Hello, Frank,” she said as if she’d known him forever. “I’ve been hoping you’d come over. I’m Mabel.”

  “Afternoon, Mabel,” he said, amazed that he could understand her, shocked that she had somehow intuited his name. Some kind of telepathy? He searched back in his memory. Had her lips matched her words? Yes, they had matched. So it was true. At some fundamental level everyone in the universe spoke English.

  “I’m so glad we’ve finally met,” she said. “Everyone says you’re very nice.”

  Uh oh. People were talking about him. The fact that they were people on an entirely different planet was particularly troubling. He would have to keep his eyes peeled.

  “Come on in and have a glass of lemonade, Frank.”

  “That sounds great.” He climbed up on the porch and followed her into the house. Just inside, she took a sharp left turn down a short passage that opened up into a gleaming white and chrome kitchen. The smell of sweet basil drifted in the air.

  Mabel opened the refrigerator and leaned in for the lemonade, giving Frank a chance to check out her bottom which he thought was very nice, but he felt the blood rush to his face when he saw the little green head looking at him from her shoulder.

  “Ah, sorry,” he said and looked away.

  “What?” Mabel straightened up and turned to him with a pitcher of lemonade.

  “Oh, never mind,” he said.

  Her grin got wider. “You were talking to Daisy, weren’t you?”

  Frank didn’t know what to say. He’d never known how to act around people who named their body parts. This case was a little different, he admitted, but he was embarrassed nonetheless. He could see clearly that the differences between them were profound. He had reached across a galaxy to her, but could they ever really touch?

  She came close and handed him a glass of lemonade. He could see small beads of sweat on her upper lip. Her smell made his head swim. His hand shook as he reached for the glass, and he shuddered, rattling the ice, when he touched her cool fingers.

  At that moment he saw a fury of green wings from the corner of his eye, and he froze as a creature landed on his shoulder and dug talons into his flesh.

  Confusion washed through him. He darted a glance at Mabel and saw that her green twin had not somehow gotten off her body. This was something new.

  “Ah ha!” Mabel cried. “I knew you were our kind of people, Frank. Clancy likes you!” She waggled a finger in his direction. “Such a good boy!”

  “So this is it,” Frank said. He’d been taken over, occupied. Who would have thought? The woman had been bait. Dejorans were not born; they were made.

  Frank felt himself merging with the creature on his shoulder, felt himself losing his will to resist, felt himself becoming Dejoran. He hoped the relationship would be symbiotic and not parasitic, but that was nothing he could control. He realized that he had never had control over anything, that he had never understood the universe, that there was nothing to do but reach out and touch someone. Huddle. Cuddle. Cling together. He put his hand out and Mabel took it.

  Frank twisted around to look for the first time into the eyes of the creature that would ride him forever, his other half.

  “Hello, big boy,” said the little green head. “Wanna mambo?”

  On the one hand, he was talking to himself, it was his little green head, so he should know very well the correct answer. On the other hand, there were subtleties to consider. Did his right hand know what his left hand was doing? Was escape still an option? And if it was still an option, did he really want to sacrifice the promise of fruity rum drinks, salsa, and flickering firelight as he danced the nights away with Mabel under these strange new stars? No. He didn’t want to get away.

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  Ceremony

  There were still ten, maybe fifteen, kids lined up in front of the peppermint alcove when Santa died.

  Brenda, as Santa’s helper in her short red skirt, whose fake white fur hem just covered her red underwear, and a floppy red hat, whose white cotton puff ball hung over her left shoulder, was pretty sure that yelling “He’s dead!” was not the way to bring x-mas cheer to the cranky kids and box and bag-burdened parents, all looking like they were waiting their turn for measles shots. Instead she stepped in front of the jolly old gentleman and urgently motioned Bob away from his camera.

  Bob scanned her from head to toe, from toe to head as he approached, his fingers curling and uncurling in anticipation of touching her. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to break it to them,” Brenda whispered.
“But your Santa just died.”

  “Died?” Bob darted a glance over her shoulder at Santa where he sat with his chin on his chest. “He can’t do that! I just crossed the break even point.”

  A dad from the line called, “Hey! What’s the hold up?”

  Bob put on a smile and turned it on the waiting shoppers. “Nothing, nothing,” he said. “We’re almost ready.”

  “That’ll be some trick,” Brenda whispered.

  “Now look.” Bob grabbed her upper arm and leaned in close. “You get back there and work his head. Yeah, that’s it. Get down on your knees behind his chair, and, you know, move his head around like he’s talking. I’ll lead the kids up, put them on his knee, and shoot them. Quick-like. We’ll run them through so fast nobody’ll notice.”

  “Work his head?”

  Bob narrowed his eyes. “Don’t give me static on this, Brenda. I make no money if I don’t shoot these last ones. I can get another Santa tomorrow, and I can get another pretty pair of legs to replace you, too.”

  Brenda had been working for Bob for three days. Another day and she’d have the rent. Get fired now and she might spend the holidays on the Phoenix streets. At times like these, Brenda always heard Dolly Parton singing “Working 9 to 5” in her head.

  “You do what you gotta do, kid,” Dolly said.

  “You’re right.” Brenda pictured Dolly as she would be tonight on her Christmas-at-Home special with her family in the Smokies. Brenda planned on cooking a turkey leg to eat while watching the show wrapped in the afghan she’d knitted herself for the occasion. She’d sing along.

  Brenda walked behind Santa’s chair and got down on one knee. Bob grinned and scurried away to the line, saying, “Who’s next? Who’s next?”