By the light of the moon

afflicted
with the Armstrong ass past thirty. Sometimes Gloria attributed her
enduringly lean posterior to the fact that she had made a novena to
the Blessed Virgin three times each year since the age of nine,
when she'd first become aware that sudden colossal butt expansion
might lie in her future; at other times, she thought that maybe a
periodic flirtation with bulimia had something to do with the fact
that she could still sit on a bicycle seat without requiring the
services of a proctologist to dismount.
    Jilly, too, was a believer, but she'd never made a novena in the
hope of petitioning for a merciful exemption from gluteus
muchomega. Her reticence in this matter arose not because she
doubted that such a petition would be effective, but only because
she was incapable of raising the issue of her butt in a spiritual
conversation with the Holy Mother.
    She had practiced bulimia for two miserable days, when she was
thirteen, before deciding that daily volitional vomiting was worse
than living two thirds of your life in stretchable ski pants, with
a quiet fear of narrow doorways. Now she pinned all her hopes on
dry toast for breakfast and wizardly advances in plastic
surgery.
    The ice and vending machines were in an alcove off the covered
walkway that served her room, no more than fifty feet from her
door. A faint breeze, coming off the desert, was too hot to cool
the night and so dry that she half expected her lips to parch and
split with an audible crackle; hissing faintly, this current of air
seemed to serpentine along the covered passage as if it, too, were
searching for something with which to wet its scaly lips.
    En route, Jilly encountered a rumpled, kindly-looking man who,
apparently returning from the automated oasis, had just purchased a
can of Coke and three bags of peanuts. His eyes were the faded blue
of a Sonoran or a Mojave sky in August, when even Heaven can't hold
its color against the intense bleaching light, but he wasn't native
to the region, for his round face was pink, not cancerously tan,
seamed by excess weight and by time rather than by the merciless
Southwest sun.
    Although his eyes didn't focus on Jilly, and though he wore the
distracted half-smile of someone lost in a jungle of complex but
pleasant thoughts, the man spoke as he approached her: 'If I'm dead
an hour from now, I'd sure regret not having eaten a lot of peanuts
before the lights went out. I love peanuts.'
    This statement was peculiar at best, and Jilly was a young woman
of sufficient experience to know that in contemporary America you
should not reply to strangers who, unbidden, revealed their fears
of mortality and their preferred deathbed snacks. Maybe you were
dealing with a blighted soul who had been made eccentric by the
stresses of modern life. More likely, however, you were being
confronted by a drug-blasted psychopath who wanted to carve a crack
pipe from your femur and use your skin as the cloth for a
decorative cozy to cover his favorite beheading ax. Nevertheless,
perhaps because the guy appeared so harmless, or maybe because
Jilly herself was a tad wiggy after too long a period during which
all her conversation had been conducted with a jade plant, she
replied: 'For me, it's root beer. When my time is up, I want to
cross a River Styx of pure root beer.'
    Failing to acknowledge her response, he drifted serenely past,
surprisingly light on his feet for a man his size, gliding almost
as smoothly as an ice skater, his locomotion in sync with his
half-loco smile.
    She watched him walk away until she was convinced that he was
nothing worse than another weary soul who'd been wandering too long
through the lonely immensity of the Southwest deserts –
perhaps a tired salesman assigned to a territory so vast that it
tested his stamina – dazed by the daunting distances between
destinations, by sun-silvered highways that seemed to go on
forever.
    She knew how he might feel. Part of her unique stage shtick, her
comedic ID, was to present herself as a true Southwest chick, a
sand-sucking cactuskicker who ate a bowl of jalapeno peppers every
morning for breakfast, who hung out in country-music bars with guys
named Tex and Dusty, who was a full sun-ripened woman but also
tough enough to grab a rattlesnake if it dared to hiss at her,
crack it like a whip, and snap its brains out through its eye
sockets. She booked dates in clubs all across the country, but she
spent a significant part of her time in Texas, New Mexico,