By the Light of the Moon

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 to Lordsburg, north of the Pyramid Mountains, then to the town of Road Forks, New Mexico, and eventually across the state line, she brooded about the past, trying to understand where she'd gone wrong in each failed relationship.

Although prepared to accept the blame for the implosion of every romance, second-guessing herself with the intense critical analysis of a bomb-squad cop deciding which of several wires ought to be cut to save the day, she finally concluded, not for the first time, that the fault resided less in herself than in those feckless men she'd trusted. They were betrayers. Deceivers. Given every benefit of the doubt, viewed through the rosiest of rose-colored lenses, they were nonetheless swine, three little pigs who exhibited all the worst porcine traits and none of the good ones. If the big bad wolf showed up at the door of their straw house, the neighbors would cheer him when he blew it down and would offer him the proper wine to accompany a pork-chop dinner.

'I am a bitter, vengeful bitch,' Jilly declared.

In his quiet way, sweet little Fred disagreed with her.

'Will I ever meet a decent man?' she wondered.

Though he possessed numerous fine qualities – patience, serenity, a habit of never complaining, an exceptional talent for listening and for quietly commiserating, a healthy root structure – Fred made no claim to clairvoyance. He couldn't know if Jilly would one day meet a decent man. In most matters, Fred trusted in destiny. Like other passive species lacking any means of locomotion, he had little choice but to rely on fate and hope for the best.

'Of course I'll meet a decent man,' Jilly decided with a sudden resurgence of the hopefulness that usually characterized her. 'I'll meet dozens of decent men, scores of them, hundreds.' A melancholy sigh escaped her as she braked in response to a traffic backup in the westbound lanes of Interstate 10, immediately ahead of her. 'The question isn't whether I'll meet a truly decent man, but whether I'll recognize him if he doesn't arrive with a loud chorus of angels and a flashing halo that says GOOD GUY, GOOD GUY, GOOD GUY.'

Jillian couldn't see Fred's smile, but she could feel it, sure enough.

'Oh, face facts,' she groaned, 'when it comes to guys, I'm naive and easily misled.'

When he heard the truth, Fred knew it. Wise Fred. The quiet with which he greeted Jilly's admission was far different from the quiet disagreement that he had expressed when she'd called herself a bitter, vengeful bitch.

Traffic came to a full stop.

Through a royal-purple twilight and past nightfall, they endured another long wait, this time at the Arizona Agricultural Inspection Station east of San Simon, which currently served state and federal law-enforcement agencies. In addition to Department of Agriculture officers, a few flinty-eyed plainclothes agents, on assignment from some less vegetable-oriented organization, evidently were searching for pests more destructive than fruit flies breeding in contraband oranges. In fact they grilled Jilly as if they believed a chador and a submachine gun were concealed under the car seat, and they studied Fred with wariness and skepticism, as though convinced that he was of Mideastern origin, held fanatical political views, and harbored evil intentions.

Even these tough-looking men, who had reason to regard every traveler with suspicion, could not long mistake Fred for a villain. They stepped back and waved the Coupe DeVille through the checkpoint.

As Jilly put up the power window and accelerated, she said, 'It's a good thing they didn't throw you in the slammer, Freddy. Our budget's too tight for bail money.'

They drove a mile in silence.

A ghost moon, like a faint ectoplasmic eye, had risen before sundown; and with the fall of night, its Cyclops stare brightened.

'Maybe talking to a plant isn't just an eccentricity,' Jilly brooded. 'Maybe I'm a little off my nut.'

North and south of the highway lay dark desolation. The cool lunar light could not burn away the stubborn gloom that befell the desert after sundown.

'I'm sorry, Fred. That was a mean thing to say.'

The little jade was proud but also forgiving. Of the three men with whom Jilly had explored the dysfunctional side of romance, none would have hesitated to turn even her most innocent expression of discontent against her; each would have used it to make her feel guilty and to portray himself as the long-suffering victim of her unreasonable expectations. Fred, bless him, never played those power games.

For a while they rode in companionable silence, conserving a flagon of fuel by traveling in the high-suction slipstream of a speeding Peterbilt that, judging by the advertisement on its rear doors, was hauling ice-cream treats to hungry snackers west of New Mexico.

When they came upon a town radiant with the signs of motels and service stations, Jilly exited the interstate. She tanked up from a self-serve pump at Union 76.

Farther along the street, she bought dinner at a burger place. A counter clerk as wholesome and cheerful as an idealized grandmother in a Disney film, circa 1960, insisted on fixing a smiling-toad pin to Jilly's blouse.

The restaurant appeared sufficiently clean to serve as an operating theater for a quadruple by-pass in the event that one of the customers at last achieved multiple artery blockages while consuming another double-patty cheeseburger. Of itself, however, mere cleanliness wasn't enough to induce Jilly to eat at one of the small Formica-topped tables under a glare of light intense enough to cause genetic mutations.

In the parking lot, in the Coupe DeVille, as Jilly ate a chicken sandwich and French fries, she and Fred listened to her favorite radio talk show, which focused on such things as UFO sightings, evil extraterrestrials eager to breed with human women, Big Foot (plus his recently sighted offspring, Little Big Foot), and time travelers from the far future who had built the pyramids for unknown malevolent purposes. This evening, the smoky-voiced host – Parish Lantern – and his callers were exploring the dire threat posed by brain leeches purported to be traveling to our world from an alternate reality.

None of the listeners who phoned the program had a word to say about fascistic Islamic radicals determined to destroy civilization in order to rule the world, which was a relief. After establishing residence in the occipital lobe, a brain leech supposedly took control of its human host, imprisoning the mind, using the body as its own; these creatures were apparently slimy and nasty, but Jilly was comforted as she listened to Parish and his audience discuss them. Even if brain leeches were real, which she didn't believe for a minute, at least she could understand them: their genetic imperative to conquer other species, their parasitic nature. On the other hand, human evil rarely, if ever, came with a simple biological rationale.

Fred lacked a brain that might serve as a leech condominium, so he could enjoy the program without any qualms whatsoever regarding his personal safety.

Jilly expected to be refreshed by the dinner stop, but when she finished eating, she was no less weary than when she had exited the interstate. She'd been looking forward to an additional four-hour drive across the desert to Phoenix, accompanied part of the way by Parish Lantern's soothing paranoid fantasies. In her current logy condition, however, she was a danger on the highway.

Through the windshield, she saw a motel across the street. 'If they don't allow pets,' she told Fred, 'I'll sneak you in.'