By the light of the moon

when
he passed squat sago palms and spiky cactuses and other hardy
desert landscaping, and also while he followed the concrete
walkways that served the motel, and certainly when he passed the
humming and softly clinking soda-vending machines, lost in thought,
brooding about the soft chains of family commitment – he was
stalked. So stealthy was the approach that the stalker must have
matched him step for step, breath for breath. At the door to his
room, clutching bags of food, fumbling with his key, he heard too
late a betraying scrape of shoe leather. Dylan turned his head,
rolled his eyes, glimpsed a looming moon-pale face, and sensed as
much as saw the dark blur of something arcing down toward his
skull.
    Strangely, he didn't feel the blow and wasn't aware of falling.
He heard the paper bags crackle, smelled onions, smelled warm
cheese, smelled pickle chips, realized that he was facedown on the
concrete, and hoped that he hadn't spilled Shep's milkshake. Then
he dreamed a little dream of dancing French fries.

2
    Jillian Jackson had a pet jade plant, and she treated
it always with tender concern. She fed it a carefully calculated
and measured mix of nutrients, watered it judiciously, and
regularly misted its fleshy, oval-shaped, thumb-size leaves to wash
off dust and maintain its glossy green beauty.
    That Friday night, while traveling from Albuquerque, New Mexico,
to Phoenix, Arizona, where she had a three-night gig the following
week, Jilly did all the driving because Fred had neither a license
to drive nor the necessary appendages to operate a motor vehicle.
Fred was the jade plant.
    Jilly's midnight-blue 1956 Cadillac Coupe DeVille was the love
of her life, which Fred understood and graciously accepted, but her
little Crassula argentea (Fred's birth name) remained a
close second in her affections. She had purchased him when he'd
been just a sprig with four stubby branches and sixteen thick
rubbery leaves. Although he had been housed in a tacky
three-inch-diameter black plastic pot and should have looked tiny
and forlorn, he'd instead appeared plucky and determined from the
moment that she'd first seen him. Under her loving care, he had
grown into a beautiful specimen about a foot in height and eighteen
inches in diameter. He thrived now in a twelve-inch glazed
terra-cotta pot; including soil and container, he weighed twelve
pounds.
    Jilly had crafted a firm foam pillow, a ramped version of the
doughnutlike seat provided to patients following hemorrhoid
surgery, which prevented the bottom of the pot from scarring the
passenger's-seat upholstery and which provided Fred with a level
ride. The Coupe DeVille had not come with seat belts in 1956, and
Jilly had not come with one, either, when she'd been born in 1977;
but she'd had simple lap belts added to the car for herself and for
Fred. Snug in his custom pillow, with his pot belted to the seat,
he was as safe as any jade plant could hope to be while hurtling
across the New Mexico badlands at speeds in excess of eighty miles
per hour.
    Sitting below the windows, Fred couldn't appreciate the desert
scenery, but Jilly painted word pictures for him when from time to
time they encountered a stunning vista.
    She enjoyed exercising her descriptive powers. If she failed to
parlay the current series of bookings in seedy cocktail lounges and
second-rate comedy clubs into a career as a star comedian, her
backup plan was to become a best-selling novelist.
    Even in dangerous times, most people dared to hope, but Jillian
Jackson insisted upon hope, took as much sustenance from it
as she took from food. Three years ago, when she'd been a waitress,
sharing an apartment with three other young women to cut costs,
eating only the two meals a day that she received gratis from the
restaurant where she worked, before she landed her first job as a
performer, her blood had been as rich with hope as with red cells,
white cells, and platelets. Some people might have been daunted by
such big dreams, but Jilly believed that hope and hard work could
win everything she wanted.
    Everything except the right man.
    Now, through the waning afternoon, from Los Lunas to Socorro, to
Las Cruces, during a long wait at the U.S. Customs Station east of
Akela, where inspections of late were conducted with greater
seriousness than they had been in more innocent days, Jilly thought
about the men in her life. She'd had romantic relationships with
only three, but those three were three too many. Onward