Seize the Night

when the call doesn't come through her engineer, Sasha always knows if it's me.
    “Are you spinning a tune?” I asked.
    “A Mess of Blues.”
    “Elvis.”
    “Less than a minute to go.”
    “I know how you do that,” I said.
    “Do what?”
    “Say, Hey, Snowman, before I speak a word.”
    “So how do I do it?”
    “Probably half the calls you ever answer directly on the back line are from me, so you always answer Hey, Snowman.”
    “Wrong.”
    “Right,” I insisted.
    “I never lie.”
    That was true.
    “Stay with me, baby,” she said, putting me on hold.
    While I waited for her to come back, I could hear her program over the phone line. She did a live public-service spot followed by a doughnut spot—recorded material at the front and back, with a live plug in the center—for a local car dealership.
    Her voice is husky yet silky, soft and smooth and inviting. She could sell me a time-share condominium in Hell, as long as it came with air-conditioning.
    I tried not to be entirely distracted by that voice as I listened with one ear for a creaking floorboard. Outside, the street remained deserted.
    To give herself a full five minutes with me, she set up back-to-back tracks. Sinatra's “It Was a Very Good Year,” followed by Patsy Cline's “I Fall to Pieces.”
    When she returned to me, I said, “Never heard such an eclectic program format before. Sinatra, Elvis, and Patsy?”
    “It's a theme show tonight,” she said.
    “Theme?”
    “Haven't you been listening?”
    “Busy. What theme?”
    “Night of the Living Dead,” she said.
    “Stylin'.”
    “Thanks. What's happening?”
    “Who's your engineer this shift?”
    “Doogie.”
    Doogie Sassman is a panoramically tattooed Harley-Davidson fanatic who weighs more than three hundred pounds, twenty-five of which are accounted for by his untamed blond hair and lush silky beard. In spite of having a neck as wide as a pier caisson and a belly on which an entire family of sea gulls could gather to groom themselves, Doogie is a babe magnet who has dated some of the most beautiful women ever to walk the beaches between San Francisco and San Diego. Although he's a good guy, with enough bearish charm to star in a Disney cartoon, Doogie's solid success with stunningly gorgeous wahines—who are not normally won over by personality alone—is, Bobby says, one of the greatest mysteries of all time, right up there with what wiped out the dinosaurs and why tornadoes always zero in on trailer parks.
    I said, “Can you go canned for a couple of hours and let Doogie run the show from his control panel?”
    “You want a quickie?”
    “With you, I want a forever.”
    “Mr. Romance,” she said sarcastically but with secret delight.
    “We've got a friend needs hand-holding big time.”
    Sasha's tone grew somber. “What now?” I couldn't lay out the situation in plain words, because of the possibility that the call was being monitored. In Moonlight Bay we live in a police state so artfully imposed that it is virtually invisible. If they were listening, I didn't want to tip them to the fact that Sasha would be going to Lilly Wing's house, because they might decide to stop her before she got there. Lilly desperately needed support. If Sasha dropped in by surprise, maybe by the back door, the cops would discover that she could stick like a five-barbed fishhook.
    “Do you know …” I thought I saw movement in the street, but when I squinted through the bungalow window, I decided I'd seen only a moon shadow, perhaps caused by the tail of a cloud brushing across one cheek of the lunar face. “Do you know thirteen ways?”
    “Thirteen ways?”
    “The blackbird thing,” I said, wiping at the glass again with the Kleenex. My breath had left a faint condensation.
    “Blackbird. Sure.”
    We were talking about Wallace Stevens's poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” My father worried about how I, limited by XP, would make it in the world without family, so he bequeathed to me a house without a mortgage and the proceeds of a huge life insurance policy. But he had given me another comforting legacy, too, a love of modern poetry. Because Sasha had acquired this passion from me, we could confound eavesdroppers as Bobby and I had done by using surfer lingo.
    “There's a word you expect him to use,” I said, referring to Stevens, “but it never appears.”
    “Ah,” she said, and I knew she was following me.
    A lesser poet writing thirteen stanzas