Meet Me in the Moon Room (4 page)

Finally Fruit

W
hen Escotilla, Arizona assembled for the feeding, the townsfolk discovered the monster had grown fruit overnight.

Sam Briggs, holding tight to the neck of his beer bottle, stumbled out of the Oxblood Tavern and leaned against the wall. He pushed his crumpled western hat to the back of his head and looked here and there, blinking his eyes as if amazed to come at long last awake and find himself in such a place as Escotilla on a hot August morning.

Escotilla had struggled for years to put Sam Briggs in his place. He was a little too young to be the town drunk. He was much too old to be sowing his wild oats. His father had been the pharmacist, but everyone agreed that Sam would never follow in his father’s footsteps. He hung around the Oxblood, drinking beer and pinching the bottom of Lila Moore, who owned the place and still played the bar girl. All anyone could say for sure was that, besides being generally good for nothing, Sam had some secret sin bottled up inside of him—some scar on his soul that he covered with too much beer and too much loud laughter. Pinned down, Sam would have said there was just something he’d forgotten, something right at the tip of his tongue that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

That morning he couldn’t shake the feeling that the thing he’d forgotten, the thing that had, in one way or another, determined the course of his life, had to do with the monster and her new fruit.

Squatting in the dusty town square, she looked like a squashed Sumo wrestler with a huge tropical tree growing from the top of her head. Had two big men been able to get close to her, had they dared stand on her massive shoulders, they could not have encircled her shingled, cream-colored trunk with their arms. Her eyes, as big as dinner plates, were closed, but her long lashes fluttered. Her wide mouth hung open a little, and Sam could see the white spikes of her teeth gleaming in the morning sunlight. A family of four could have eaten dinner comfortably around either of her pink splayed feet. Her wiry black and gray hair flowed over her back like dead vines.

Sam watched Mike Mitchell leaning against the rail of the bandstand, his trumpet loose at the end of his arm. Mike squinted up at the bunches of elongated, tapered yellow fruit under the monster’s broad green leaves and peach-and-white blossoms. He stroked the mustache at the edge of his upper lip. Mike thought the mustache made him look dashing. Sam thought it made him look slick and untrustworthy. But what the hell? It would be a shame if any of the old gang went and got respectable. As Bandmaster, Mike had come the closest of any of them, but what would the band play this morning? Where would Mike find his inspiration this time?

Up the street, Sam saw Craig Taft and his father, Walter, each struggling with the end of a long pole onto which a big sow had been tied by her legs. They stopped some ten feet in front of the monster and lowered the pig to the ground. Craig’s father took a big red-checked handkerchief from his back pocket, mopped his face, and then wandered away to talk to a group of men out in front of Bert’s Barber Shop.

Craig knelt and rubbed the sow’s belly and sagging teats. Sam knew Craig hated losing one of his pigs, every one of which he’d given a name to, but the monster had to be fed, and it was his turn. Long ago, before they’d taken to feeding her regularly, she had walked, and on those walks, she gobbled up Mr. Ramsey’s entire gaggle of geese, a donkey, and little Billy Boshkin. Better she squat rooted in the square.

Sam pushed away from the wall of the Oxblood and walked over to Craig and his snorting sow. Craig was a big man with powerful arms and legs. His wheat-colored hair stuck up in the back, and his face was boyish, somehow sweet. He looked up when Sam touched his shoulder. Tears, like jewels, had gathered at the corners of his eyes. He turned his eyes quickly back down at the sow.

“There, there, Big Betty,” he said. “No trouble. You just take it easy, old girl.”

Sam squatted down on his heels by Craig. “Something you can do for me.”

“Ain’t the time, Sammy.”

“Got to be now,” Sam said. “It’s no big deal.”

Craig didn’t look up from Big Betty’s pink and brown speckled belly.

Sam squeezed Craig’s shoulder. “How far you figure you could throw me, Craig?”

“Throw you?” Craig, looking interested in spite of himself, turned his face up to Sam.

“Yeah. Well, suppose you was to get down on one knee and cup your hands and I was to come running and you was to, you know, toss me? How far you figure you could throw me?”

“Skinny butt-head like you, Sammy, I could throw to the moon.”

“Don’t need to go that far.” Sam jerked his chin up at the monster’s trunk. “Just want to get me one of those bananas.”

“You crazy?”

“You know the answer to that one, old son.” Sam grinned and punched Craig on the shoulder. “So will you do it? You toss the bacon here. Then real quick-like you kneel, and I come running.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“What?”

“Big Betty. Bacon.”

“Yeah, right. Right. Well, will you do it?”

“So, why don’t you just wait until she’s fed and sleepy and climb up from the back? You could get too high to reach before she knew what was happening.”

“Where’s the sport in that? Come on, work with me here.”

Craig looked around at Escotilla’s assembled citizenry. “They ain’t gonna like it.”

Sam punched him in the arm. “Do they ever? But old Mike there’ll like it. Liable to swallow his horn. And Lila.” He leered at Craig and wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “You know Lila will get a kick out of it. And you and me’ll like it. The Terrible Five ride again!”

“Four,” Craig said. “The Terrible Four.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you said . . .”

Sam cut him off. “So will you do it?” Craig’s father separated himself from his barbershop cronies and ambled back to help toss the pig. “Hurry up, Craig. Tell me you’ll do it.”

“Your funeral,” Craig said, and shrugged.

Sam slapped Craig on the shoulder again and got to his feet. “That’s my man.” He stepped back to give himself some running room.

Craig’s father took up one end of the pole and Craig took up the other. Big Betty struggled and squealed. Mike on the bandstand waved his hands at his ragtag troop of musicians: Spanish guitar, fiddle, French horn, and tuba. He put the trumpet to his lips, and the band leaped, like a startled deer, into a song.

Mike lowered his trumpet and sang: “Yes, she has no bananas. She has no bananas today!”

The monster roared.

Sam put his hands on his knees and got ready to make his mad dash. Craig and his father swung Big Betty—one, two, three. The song tingled through Sam’s body. Craig and his father tossed the pig at the monster’s gaping meatgrinder mouth.

The pig screamed.

Sam tossed his hat to the ground and ran.

Craig dropped to one knee and cupped his hands.

“She has no bananas today!” Mike sang.

Sam stepped into Craig’s hands, and Craig heaved. Sam flew. The monster closed her teeth on the pig, and Big Betty’s scream stopped abruptly in a riot of snapping bones and dark blood.

Sam sailed over the monster’s terrible face and hit her trunk with a splat. He felt himself slipping, and he clawed at her rough bark.

She must have swallowed the pig or spat it out, because she roared again, and her trunk swayed from side to side as if a hot desert storm had raged up the mountain to blow through Escotilla. Sam scrambled up her trunk for the bunched fruit. Her arms, he knew, could only reach so far.

Maybe far enough. Something scratched down the back of his jeans and snatched at his boots. He looked down and saw her pale white hands, strangely delicate with their long white fingers, clawing for a hold. He climbed out of range.

She stretched up her arms, like sinewy vines, as far as she could, but she couldn’t reach him. She shuddered, then quieted and pulled her arms back down. Sam hoisted himself up to her bananas.

There were two bunches, one to the left and one to the right. Like ears, he thought. Little black flies swarmed around the fruit. Sam stretched out one arm and grabbed a banana, and the monster trembled. He pulled but the banana wouldn’t break loose. He glanced down and around at the townsfolk. Everyone was silent, watching him, waiting, he thought, for him to make a mistake and fall. Crazy Sam Briggs.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He jerked at the banana, once, twice, and it came away in his hand. She groaned. Where the banana had been attached, bright red blood gathered and fell in slow drops to the dusty street below.

Sam inched his way up under the hanging fruit until he could wedge himself in, freeing his arms and hands to open his prize. The stem still bled a little, and he bent it to one side. The rind split along the top, and he tugged it away from the fruit inside. More like pulling the skin from a chicken. Inside, the fruit was gray with pale purple veins running through it.

Sam tossed the skin away and raised the warm flesh of her banana to his lips. He closed his eyes and bit and felt her hot blood fill his mouth. Memory leaped up behind his head and banged his face into the tree. He fell into his childhood, into the icy summer flash flood waters roaring down Mad Dog Creek. Sammy, swept along with the red manzanita branches and broken trees of the oak and pine forest, washed ashore by the Witch’s cottage, where it had never been before. The cottage must have moved there during the night on those big chicken legs. You never knew where you’d find it.

“It does so have chicken legs! You just can’t always see them.”

“Baloney,” said Lila. And Sammy and Mike and Craig grinned and elbowed one another as the Witch’s daughter turned her bright brown eyes up at them.

Julie!

She was so pretty in her satiny black dress, her hair long and blacker than a wet crow’s wings, her skin so white, a miniature woman, a porcelain doll with a crooked grin. Julie put her hand on her mouth and wiped the smile from her face and looked at Lila. She made claws of her tiny white hands and wiggled her fingers. “Bibbity bobbity boo, Lila.” The blood drained from Lila’s face and she took a step back, then another, stumbled, and fell on her butt. What a hoot.

What shall we do, Julie? Let’s shake ‘em up. What shall we do?

The Terrible Five.

Who TPs the trees? We do!

Who soaps the windows? We do!

Who runs the town ragged?

Who is it? Who is it? The Pharmacist’s boy. The Pig Farmer’s kid. And that Mike who toots his own horn. And Lila. Lila with the tits, and she’s not even ten. Imagine that. And don’t forget the Witch’s Daughter. The one who’s so hard to see. Julie Yaga.

They sat quietly on that stuffy summer afternoon, looking at Julie’s head. The cottage was strangely still. Julie stared down at her hands folded in her lap.

“Baba’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“Bigger fish to fry, she said.” Julie looked up at them, and they could see she’d been crying. “She said I’d be fine. Keep sewing, she said.”

“But what is that on your head?” Lila demanded.

“I dropped another stitch this morning,” Julie said.

“But what is that?” Lila asked again. She reached out but didn’t touch.

The boys were curious, too, but they wouldn’t ask.

Julie ran the back of her hand under her nose and sat up a little straighter. “I don’t know. It was just there this morning.”

Sammy moved in closer to look at the little tree rising up through Julie’s black hair. There were little green leaves, just at the top, and tiny white flowers.

“Well, take it off!” Lila said. “It looks stupid. Like a green toilet brush or something.”

“I can’t.” Julie looked sad. “It’s growing there.”

“Oh, gross!” Lila said. “That’s disgusting.”

“Hey! I think it’s neat.” Sam sat down beside Julie and put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her close. “It’ll drive ‘em crazy in town.”

They all got to giggling then. Even Lila joined the group hug.

“They needn’t know,” Julie said. “No one should know that Baba’s gone. They’d take me away if they found out. You’ll all forget I said she was gone.”

“Sure we will,” said Sam.

In the years that followed, the tree grew taller and wider. Julie’s neck expanded to the circumference of her head. She had to hold on to things for balance when she walked. Sometimes she needed help. Mike was too busy with his horn, Craig with his pigs, Lila with her tits. Finally only Sam remembered her at all.

“You’ll leave me, too, Sammy.”

Sam sat tossing rocks into the creek. “No, I won’t.” He’d been thinking of Lila and the way his head swam when she’d touched him the night before at the Grange dance. He looked away from Julie’s squashed features. Her flattening eyes. Her wide mouth always seeming to grin horribly under the weight of her tree. As the tree grew, her body spread. Her legs grew shorter and thicker. She’d developed a smell that reminded Sam of raw chicken.

“Everyone leaves me,” she said. “First her, then them, now you.”

“You know I love you, Julie,” he said, but he said it automatically. He couldn’t have said what it meant, unless it described the nagging obligation he felt.

“Maybe you did once,” she said. “But it looks like it wasn’t enough to stand up to this kind of pain.”

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to that kind of stupid talk.” He got up and dusted off the seat of his pants. He had brought her food, but he didn’t want to stay and watch her tear it to pieces. “I’d better get back.”

“Just like I said. You don’t want to be around me.”

Sam looked up at Julie’s tree, and he felt a cold rage twist his guts. “Haven’t I spent enough time talking to the trees?”

Julie jerked back and nearly toppled herself. He felt a strange satisfaction at her stricken look.

“The least you could do,” he said, “is sprout some fruit.”

Julie put her hands over her face and her shoulders shook and her leaves rustled.

“How about bananas?” Sam’s rage peaked and he put his hand on Julie’s shoulder and pushed.

She sat back hard on the ground, then toppled to the side. She looked up at him. “I thought you were my friend, Sammy.” She put her hands over her face and cried.

He was glad he’d hurt her, this creature, this thing that had swallowed his friend and scattered the gang. Together they had had something; separately they were all so ordinary, each of them lining up to be defined, pinned down, understood, and dismissed.

He squatted down in front of her and pulled her hands from her face. “Julie was my friend. You’re just something that came out of the woods and stole her.”