Meet Me in the Moon Room (16 page)

I reach for the door.

The Finger

B
obby wanted to practice it on his mother, but he knew her face would turn red, then purple, and he’d see all the veins pulsing in her head. Smoke would pour from her ears and nose. Her eyes would pinwheel, and sparks would fly. Her lips would disappear in a tight mean line. She’d start vibrating and humming, and the top of her head would blow off like the lid of a steam kettle, and everything inside would run down her face, melting her until there’d be nothing left but a puddle of Mom stuff. So Bobby told her he was going out, instead.

He let the rusty spring on the screen door have its way as he ran from the kitchen into the Arizona sunshine and summer bug noise, and he was almost out of sight when he heard the satisfying bang! that made all the peacocks scream.

Bobby lazed on down the street, Main Street, the only street, a dirt road really, kicking rocks and looking for devils’ horns. Swarms of summertime flies buzzed around his head. He pulled at his jeans and the shorts riding up in the crack of his butt. He kept an eye out for whirlwinds to stand in as he practiced flipping birds, the middle finger of his right hand snicking out like the blade of a switchblade knife.

Do it once, then do it twice, then do it again. This was a necessary man type skill, his cousin fat Edward, who was thirteen and should know, had told him. Necessary for a gee man, Bobby thought (but never said) because that’s what he was going to be—a gee man and maybe get himself a good golly molly. Twist and shout! Yes. He flipped off the sky.

And the sky said, “Hey!”

Bobby tipped his head back to see a man in a cage. The cage hung from a high branch of the biggest oak tree around. Jail tree. Everyone called the prisoner Robert; everyone knew he liked to drink whiskey and pinch the bottoms of bar girls. Bobby flipped him off.

Robert held the bars of the cage with both hands and glared down at Bobby. “Don’t do that, Bobby B.”

“That’s not my name,” Bobby said and held up his fist and triggered his finger again. Just when his middle finger snapped into position, he jabbed at Robert with his whole hand—a nice bit of style, Bobby thought.

“I told you not to do that!” Robert yelled. He pumped his legs and the cage swung on its rope. Bobby showed him his bird again.

Robert had gotten the cage going around in a circle, and now he crashed it against the trunk of the oak tree. “You just wait till I get out of here!”

Bobby flipped him off again, and then as Robert slumped to the floor of the cage and broke into tears, Bobby ran off down Main Street.

What was it about this gesture, he wondered, that it could make a grown man cry? Such power and magic. It was like when he’d called his cousin Edward a cocksucker, a term he’d gotten from Edward in the first place. Edward had chased him around and around the barn yelling that he’d kill him if he ever got his hands around Bobby’s pussy neck. Cats and chickens. It didn’t make a lot of sense. There was something potent and dirty about sucking on roosters, but Bobby couldn’t figure what it could be. Cock Robin. Or maybe something to do with devil worship; he’d heard they liked to kill things and drink blood, or maybe geeks, the way Edward said they liked to bite the heads off chickens and suck the eggs up through the bleeding top. But wouldn’t that make it hensucking?

Bobby discovered a new refinement. As the middle finger of his right hand snicked out, he slapped the whole hand into his left palm, making a sharp smack that scared birds from the rooftops and set a snake to rattling right there in the middle of the road in front of him.

Coiled, pastel pink and blue and orange and green, the duckbill rattlesnake snarled, showing its daffy little needlesharp teeth. It swept its head left and right keeping its bright eyes on Bobby. The snake’s dry rattle was so fast, Bobby couldn’t see the tail move. He stopped in his tracks and flipped off the snake.

The snake froze like it couldn’t believe its eyes then picked up its rattle twice as fast and hard as before. It hissed and spit at Bobby who jumped to the side and jabbed his middle finger into the air, yelled “Yii!” then jumped again. The snake twisted around to follow Bobby who kept moving and yelling and flipping it off. Just as Bobby thought he’d finally gotten the snake to knot itself, a car came barreling out of nowhere and honking its horn like crazy. Bobby jumped out of the way, and the car ran over the snake. Squashed it flat.

“No fair!” Bobby yelled, and when old Mr. Klein poked his head out of the side window to look back and shake his fist at Bobby, Bobby flipped a bird at him.

Mr. Klein braked hard, and the car skidded sideways and crashed into the Bait and Tackle Shop. Bobby hurried on down Main Street.

Mrs. Stokes stood hugging a brown paper bag on the steps of the Grocery Store. “Don’t slouch so, Bobby,” she said.

Bobby flipped her off.

Mrs. Stokes collapsed like she’d suddenly been unplugged.

Bobby jerked around like a gun fighter and flipped off the Dime Store, and the store exploded, spewing up electric trains and stuffed animals, comic books and pieces of plastic airplane models.

Bobby flipped off the Bright White Church on the corner, and it jumped into the air then fell onto its side with a splintering crash and the sounds of breaking glass. Flipping fast and furious now, Bobby turned the Little Red Schoolhouse into a big pile of little red bricks.

Bobby flipped off the Court-house, and smoke filled its windows. The mayor ran out screaming, “Fire! Fire!”

Downtown was beginning to look war-torn, worse for wear, maybe tornado-struck.

“You’re not being very nice, Bobby,” said the West Witch, ugly as sin his father called her, where she sat on the boardwalk with her plastic bag of empty vegetable cans and bits of bright yarn and corked bottles of powders and potions. Bobby flipped her off.

The witch’s eyes got big, then she grinned, and Bobby could see she had no teeth. “Maybe you just need something sweet to suck on. A sweet tooth. Or two.” She wiggled her eyebrows up and down at him, and sweetness filled his mouth. Chocolate. He backed away, sucking at his teeth. His front teeth. His chocolate teeth, and they were getting smaller fast, dissolving.

The witch sat rocking and slapping her knees and laughing at him, and when he zapped her with the finger again, all he was able to do was knock off her ragged bonnet, and that just seemed to make her laugh harder.

Bobby swallowed the last of his chocolate and ran on down the street, tonguing the space where his top front teeth had been. He stopped in front of the still-standing Hardware Store where he knew there was a mirror in the window. He was so much older now, growing up before his very eyes. He watched in dismay as his new teeth came in. He was a chipmunk. How could he be a gee man if he looked like a big chipmunk? No, a beaver. Bobby the Beaver. There was something about beavers, too, something that put a sly smile on Edward’s face. He’d never figure it out in time. You’re always a day late and a dollar short, his father liked to say. Bobby flipped off the Hardware Store, reducing it to piles of lumber and nails, tools and electrical parts, pipes and toilet fixtures.

He let his shoulders slump, deliberate bad posture, and slouched on down the smoky street, getting bigger, stumbling into adolescence, feeling mean and shooting I-Meant-To-Do-That! glances around whenever he tripped over his own feet, kicking the town’s rubble out of his way, taking time to flip off the county deputy and send his car tumbling with the tumble weeds. Stinking black leather jacket and dirty jeans, torn basketball shoes, flattop, a cool fool, coming up on Molly, the East Witch, as beautiful as the other one was ugly, saying, hey baby. The once-over for this one in her tight purple skirt and lacy white deep-vee blouse, brown and white shoes and bobby sox. Once-over was not enough, so the twice-over. Her dog, a blond Lab, sat by her side giving Bobby the eye, an Elvis sneer on its lips, and a little rumbling growl coming from somewhere deep inside.

“Keep your eyes to yourself, Bobby B,” Molly said.

So what could he do but flip her off?

She narrowed her eyes, said, “All right for you, Bobby. You asked for it.” She raised an eyebrow.

What was it, he wondered, with these women and their eyebrows? Something pulled his eyes closed, and when he touched his face, he discovered that his eyelashes had grown long and heavy, so long, in fact, that they fell to his chest. He had to take a handful of eyelashes in each hand and pull them up and away from his eyes before he could see Molly standing there smirking with one hand on a cocked hip and a cigarette in the other. She blew a smoky kiss his way.

“I don’t suppose you’d let me shine my gee man flashlight in your face?” Bobby asked.

“JC doesn’t like that kind of talk, Bobby.” She put her hand on the dog’s head.

“You named your dog after Jesus Christ?”

“No. After Joseph Campbell.”

Like that was his cue, the dog jumped up, circled around young Bobby B, and bit him in the seat of the pants.

Bobby dropped his eyelashes, but he could still see the sudden light. Teen epiphany. He was seized by a sudden need to rip off his clothes, run into the woods, and beat on a drum until his father came down out of the trees.

He turned and shouldered his way through the ragged refugees toward the end of Main Street and the wilderness beyond.

Just outside the remains of town, Edward jumped up from behind a big ocotillo and flipped Bobby off with both hands while doing a shimmy like he had a tail to wag. “Take that, beaver face!” he shouted.

“Same to you!” Bobby grinned and flipped Edward off so hard his cousin’s ears were pinned back.

“All right!” Edward slugged Bobby in the shoulder, and the two of them walked on, and as they walked, guys popped up from behind cacti to take potshots with that one finger salute. Snick. Snick. Like a running gun battle, but Bobby and Edward were too fast, and the vanquished soon fell in behind them, and by the time the sun had set, a Society of Men had formed.

They built a fire. They killed and cooked some rabbits. The moon soon gave them the cold shoulder. Coyotes sang. Backslapping, spitting, and farting, the men squatted with their drums in a circle around Bobby, who would soon exclaim sweet gee manly poetry.

Rejoice

T
he air is so cold and clear and the sea so calm and there, just there, if you shade the arctic sunlight from your eyes, you can see a flat-topped chip off an old iceberg floating in an otherwise empty expanse of blue water, and on the ice a moocow, a huge dog, and two naked white men engaged in Greco-Roman wrestling. Off to one side leaning, a red-lettered sign on a stick in the ice like maybe someone got tired of picketing, says Cease Co.

Mister make the passengers take turns, shoo them from the starboard rails, scatter them like chickens squacking squabbling holding onto their flowered hats and fedoras, waving handkerchiefs, stretching up their necks to look; get them back, I tell you, otherwise they’ll tip us, and while you’re at it, sound the fog horn, blow the whistle, ring the bells, and come about for a rescue.

Before we could pull them from the ice, one of the combatants leaped onto the cow and rode it into the icy ocean. The other, along with what turned out to be an Irish Wolfhound with unusual front limbs, we were able to get aboard. The rescued man, a Genevese of some education who had most recently traveled to these northern latitudes through the Americas, was soon persuaded to tell his ghoulish tale of reckless creation, unbounded pride, unbearable despair, frustrated revenge, and unfinished business.

The dog he introduced as his faithful assistant and companion, Mucho Poocho. All in good time, he said, when we wondered about the dog’s long black evening gloves.

Everything depends on the past, I told her, he said, and we said how true how true and smiled encouragement and made sympathetic noises and put out tentative fingers to touch him lightly on the arm, the head, the back of the ear, the knee, the anus, the navel, the left nostril, go on and on, you’re safe now, trust us, be calm, talk.

Blessed be the reanimated, I said, he said, and she said what is this sweet cream of consciousness; this woman, ward of my father and my bride to be, dear Elizabeth who would have to get to know her way around the laboratory and quickly, too, if we were to have any chance of happiness, especially now on the very eve of my great achievement.

I wanted to show her everything. Witness this, I said, yes, give me your hand, touch this machine with all the black knobs and buttons and levers and gauges. Look at all the hoses. Look at the dark hopper. The spark. Watch out! Touch the rough iron crank. Yes, that’s it. It hums and hums and pulses. Quite warm, yes. It has taken years of research, years of trial and error, cycle upon cycle of try/fail to bring this machine into existence. So many high hopes dashed.

The immediate ancestor of this machine was a simple reader, a device designed to appreciate Latin utterances which you would enter from a keyboard and which it would display upon a screen. I can see you’re wondering how I knew the machine really appreciated the Latin. Well, I would ask it, of course. I would say, for example, so what do you think of ogitocay ergoay umsay? And that most excellent but primitive machine would reply, oh wow that last Classic Latin Utterance was really something Else!

Proving and providing and paving the way for the current work which shows beyond all doubt that this written record, I slapped the revered volume and dust rose and she sneezed, is composed of such exquisite detail, such esoteric imagery, such private symbolism that it is not simply a book by J, dead all these many years, but rather is J himself!