Joker Moon Read online

  “I doubt that I rank high on the celebrity scale, but it’s a pleasure nonetheless.”

  Theodorus was already sliding into his place at the foot of the table, which had been widened and reshaped, with a giant snail-shaped piece cut out to allow the young joker to reach his plate. He had “dressed,” too, in a blazer perhaps altered by Omar the Tentmaker.

  Dressed in a pretty little summer dress, Mathilde took a place at the table, too, favoring me with a perfectly appropriate nod of hello, as if we had been introduced.

  No one did so; perhaps the Witherspoons just assumed we were acquainted. In any case, she was seated far enough from me that conversation was impossible, and she did not seem to engage with anyone but Theodorus.

  The meal itself was … unexpected: a stew of greens, onions, and what I took to be dandelions. Alice saw my surprise if not outright shock, and said, “We have adjusted our dining habits to honor Theodorus’s condition.”

  “Yeah, I’m a vegetarian now,” he said. “A hamburger would probably kill me.”

  Henry was at the head of the table, with Alice across from me. The staff swirled around like attendants out of some BBC drama about lords in a country manor.

  I dealt with the soup, and made some inroads on the entrée, which was largely tasteless in spite of a healthy amount of seasoning.

  There was a bit of small family talk—given the Witherspoons’ interests, make that business—with Alice and Henry doing their best to engage Theodorus.

  Politics. The Witherspoons were quite liberal for that time and station, big not only on joker rights (logically enough with Theodorus, though I wondered when they had crossed over) but on the Negro question.

  This seemed tricky, given that everyone on the staff was Black. At one point, however, Henry turned to James, the primary retainer/butler, and asked his opinion about some pending legislation in Washington. “I would like to see it pass, but I doubt it will change many minds around here.”

  It struck me that James was “James” and not, say, “Mr. Smith.”

  There was some business talk, too, about the family holdings in various aviation and missile firms, and also in new computer processing organizations.

  Theodorus took an active part in the aviation and missile discussion—so, to my surprise, did Alice. The most urgent matter, apparently, was the need for the United States to field a new intercontinental ballistic missile and the family’s hope that Dayton Enterprises (the first time I actually made the connection) would win the prime contract.

  Theodorus urged his parents to get out of the missile business—“space platforms and computers will make them obsolete”—and I was charmed by the way they engaged him on it.

  I followed the chat, chiming in where I could, but largely began to fade into silence.

  I had made a serious mistake.

  A wineglass had been set for me, and one of the staff poured a red. Now, I have had problems in the past, basically from age twenty to thirty-three, when the collapse of my marriage (to be euphemistic: it swirled down a drain) and the opportunity of a life on the road convinced me that I needed to give up alcohol.

  There had been relapses, but none for long and without real damage, so perhaps I had lulled myself into believing I had control … but I grabbed that wine without a thought, as if I had a glass every evening at dinner.

  Maybe it was the environment.

  Surely it was the company. Whatever the reason, I drank.

  As Alice said, closing the conversational door on business, “You have a colorful past, Mr. Mitchell.”

  “That’s one way to describe it. The honest word is criminal—”

  “—isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Alice said. “Honest, criminal?”

  “Without admitting to any specific malfeasance, I would compare my past to political operatives working in the ‘honest graft’ system.” I told them my stock story of the classic Pendergast political machine in Kansas City in the 1920s, where a group of nonelected but powerful individuals controlled city jobs and contracts, but operated on this principle: my brother-in-law may get the city contract to put a roof on the orphanage, but it will be a good roof!

  Alice and Henry laughed. Theodorus smiled, if that was the expression on his face. “‘Honest graft,’” Henry said. “I wish more of our business partners practiced that.”

  “Oh, darling,” Alice said, “they aren’t all criminals.”

  “A good percentage. I have never understood the need to cut corners and cheat people. Surely once one has accumulated a certain amount of wealth and security—as we have—what is the point of adding to it? Especially some tiny amount of money.”

  “It’s all about power, isn’t it?” Alice said. “Who is on top, who is biggest?”

  Theodorus snickered—that sound was unmistakable. Alice sailed on, as if she had made no racy reference, though I believe I saw a faint blush to her neck.

  And I said, “There is a lot of power right here, isn’t there?” The wine had been given voice.

  “How so?” Henry said, his eyes narrowing a bit, as if waiting for me to say something challenging.

  “You Witherspoons are not only able to pluck me out of nowhere and move me here, but you are also able to protect me from the long hairy arms of Kentucky law.”

  A bit relieved, Henry smiled. “I could fall back on the old argument, one that any of my neighbors would make, that I don’t hold with out-of-state law coming to my door to make life difficult for my guests.” The last two-thirds of that were issued in a Southern drawl worthy of a Civil War movie. “In truth, I’m just a contrarian.”

  “We also believe in your innocence,” Alice said, and now I suspected I was the object of some sport.

  Henry said, “And if not that, Malachi is convinced this whole matter will dry up and float away—”

  “With his able assistance,” I said.

  “I have to confess, Cash,” Henry said. “While I find you to be perfectly pleasant company, and a superior citizen, it’s hard for me to believe that that object in our driveway actually flew to the Moon.”

  “And back,” I said, falling back on my old routine. “That was actually the most important part.”

  “God, Dad,” Theodorus said. “You’re as bad as that idiot in Kentucky!”

  “Oh, he’s not poking a camera in Cash’s face.” I do believe Alice also had drunk a bit more wine than was wise.

  “Both of you,” Theodorus said, his words very clear now. “The Quicksilver flight was tracked by the Space Command!” He then launched into a point-by-tedious-point refutation of all claims that our flight was some kind of hoax.

  Not only couldn’t I have done it better, I couldn’t have done it as well, since Theodorus cited several supporting facts I had forgotten, including the dusting of moondust on Quicksilver’s skin. I applauded; smiling, Henry and Alice joined in. “I appear to be overwhelmed and convinced,” Henry said. “Not that I truly doubted.”

  I raised my wineglass in acknowledgment. My unsteady grip should have been a warning.

  “You’ve been on the road for, is it seven years?” Alice said.

  “Eight.” The number was right; the word was slurred.

  “But you do have a home.”

  “A house I see about sixty days a year.”

  “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Frankly, no.” I had never asked myself the question, so by default, that was the truth.

  Henry said, “Do you miss anything? Or are you a man who only lives for this moment and the next?”

  And here I just blurted: “I miss Eva-Lynne.”

  Her name was out of my mouth before I knew it. The only gratifying moment—if that’s the word—was seeing Alice Witherspoon blush.

  “Excuse me.” I stood up and quickly regretted it.

  Okay, (a) I hadn’t been drinking in years, and (b) I had hardly eaten. The wine hit me like a couple of shots of pure vodka. I swayed and, taking a step, staggered.

  I
would have paid good money to have the earth open up under me at that moment, because I knew I was making a fool of myself in front of, in ascending order of value, Henry, Theodorus, and Alice.

  James arrived with dessert, creating a blessed distraction, allowing me to slide out of the dining room without further incident. Somehow Schwartz, who never seemed to leave the Witherspoon mansion, had located Ridley, and my buddy was waiting as I staggered out the kitchen door.

  “Hey there, hey there,” he said, like a cowboy with an injured pony.

  “I relapsed,” I said. Just forming that word was an accomplishment, given my condition.

  “Happens,” he said.

  He essentially put me to bed, where there was no sleep to be had.

  I spent hours pondering my failures with Eva-Lynne.

  I had lusted after and longed for her in the months and weeks before that trip to the Moon, and suffered the agonies of her affair with Al Dearborn before the universe chose, in a weak moment, perhaps, to stop shitting on me.

  Upon our return, she moved in to my tiny shack above the Pearblossom Highway. We found low-rent jobs—she temping at Tomlin, me doing odd but legit construction work.

  We were blissfully happy for months. By late spring I was dying to make her Mrs. Mitchell, and she was happy to wear my ring.

  The newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sampson was my best man. Eva-Lynne had the improbably named Honey Burke, one of her coworkers from Haugen’s Bakery, as her maid of honor.

  It was my second marriage. As to how to count Eva-Lynne’s prior engagements, well, that was trickier: she had grown up in a polygamist compound in the Arizona Strip and had been officially married to an older man whose name she would never reveal and, when he died, at least one other, though that had yet to be consecrated before her escape.

  So I was Husband 2.5. We never spoke of her sad phase as a hooker in that awful period between escaping polygamy and landing in a bakery in Palmdale.

  So we played house. Husband and wife. The loving couple who brightened each evening with a bottle of wine or three when they weren’t closing down Pablo’s, our local saloon.

  Eva-Lynne had never finished high school, much less college, so we talked about enrolling her at Lancaster High in the fall of 1969—we even visited the school to talk about the GED and what tests she could take to shorten the road to graduation.

  I thought about going back to college myself, having left Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and majoring in business, at the very least. I flirted with the notion of engineering, possibly this new computer science stuff.

  And thought about having a family.

  This was tricky.

  I had known about her polygamist life, but not her motherhood.

  This conversation took place moments before we made love one night, as Eva-Lynne detoured to the bathroom for her birth control pill. “Why bother with that?” I said. “We’re married, right?”

  “We haven’t talked about kids at all,” she said, sliding back into bed, naked and impressively erotic.

  “I just assumed.”

  “Since when do you make all these assumptions about us?”

  “Sorry. Is it my wild card?”

  She shook her pretty head, her blond hair cascading in ways that made me forget my uncertainty.

  We talked rather than making love—this was in our bottle-of-wine-per-night phase—and she revealed that she had already given birth to two children, the first when she was fifteen. That night ended in weeping, as much from me as from her, and one of us on the couch.

  That night, in fact, ended our marriage, though that wasn’t obvious for months. I announced that I was deferring all talk or thought of children. We resumed passionate love- and homemaking as if nothing had happened. Eva-Lynne took to visiting Pablo’s every day beginning at noon. Her companion for much of this was Honey Burke, her pal from the bakery—and who was free that time of day.

  I had actually commenced a series of classes over the mountains at San Fernando Valley College, a trip that took me out of the house at eight four days a week, returning at dinnertime or later. Until the day I had a flat near Agua Dulce and was so hot, tired, and filthy that I gave up on class and returned home at 3 p.m.

  And found a man I did not know leaving my house with a just-fucked look on his face.

  I was hot, tired, dirty, not at my best. There was shouting and screaming—I had been a faithful husband to her, didn’t deserve this, etc. Her counterargument was that I didn’t deserve her, that I was a loser, a boozer, and a crook.

  The aftermath might have gone differently—there might have been some steps toward forgiveness—had I not already seen her cheat on me, with Al Dearborn. (Now, Eva-Lynne and I were not in a relationship at that time, but she knew of my interest. And knew that sleeping with the ace pilot would hurt me … because she told me so.)

  And had she not taken cruel glee in enumerating the number and type of her extramarital encounters. “I hope you were using birth control,” I snapped at one point. (Again, alcohol was a factor, both in her actions and in our nasty arguments.)

  Taking her share of what was left of the Enquirer money, Eva-Lynne moved out and then in with Honey Burke, though she did not take up her old job at the bakery, no sir.

  I quit going to Valley and did a lot of drinking and moping around until Sampson showed up on my doorstep with his offer.

  I would get reports of Eva-Lynne and Honey as the party girls of the Antelope Valley, “dating” nats, aces (especially those horny flyboys from Tomlin), and jokers, too. It was said—and in my pained hearing—that Eva-Lynne had a thing for jokers.

  And before too long, it was also said that money was changing hands, and that Eva-Lynne and Honey were not only boozing but dealing and using other substances.

  One Sunday morning in December 1970—it was the thirteenth and you could look it up—almost two years after Eva-Lynne, Mike Sampson, and I had touched the surface of the fucking Moon—I was passing Haugen’s Bakery. Out of some misguided surge of nostalgia, alcohol-fueled (it was shortly after dawn, after a late night with former Skalko associates), struck by the sight of the full moon high in the western sky, I pulled into the lot.

  There were a few customers, of course: the local gentry needed their pastries. Through the plate glass window I could see Honey Burke filling orders. At the wedding, eighteen months earlier, she had been zaftig, red-haired, bright, and jolly.

  This morning she was only one of those things. Still red-haired, she had lost a notable amount of weight and looked sad and grim.

  Eva-Lynne flitted past, so thin that her bakery uniform looked like a shroud.

  I got out of there.

  I went on the road some months later, and though the Pearblossom house was then and still is my base, it was only really home during the two most brutally hot months of summer.

  Let’s just say that Eva-Lynne and I lost touch.

  The latest word, perhaps six months back, was that she was ill—with what I didn’t know. By now the trail had gone cold … I had no mailing address and no phone number for her.

  I like to think she believed she had failed me and was, as more than one person has told me, acting out.

  I know it was the other way around.

  Eventually I did collapse into something resembling sleep, waking not long after my usual 7 a.m. I was spared the classic hangover I remember oh so well, the sharp blade of pain between the eyes, the dryness. After all, it was only a couple of glasses of wine.

  But the psychic hangover was worse. All I wanted to do was hide out in the guesthouse for the day, possibly forever. That option vanished when Ridley returned, indecently perky, toting a glass of tomato juice. “Try this.”

  “I hate tomato juice.”

  “Tough shit.”

  I choked it down, and feared that it was going to come right back up. But that moment passed, and I suspected that I would live, if in infamy. “Can I still get breakfast?”

  “Dorothy�
��s still in the kitchen.”

  As we left the house I said, “Any fallout?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, not that I would here.” He smirked. “You think you’re the first person to have one drink more than you should in a joint like this?”

  No doubt this was true, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

  By the time I met up with Theodorus, I had regained a bit of my usual vigor and was even less embarrassed about my lapse. (Ah, human resiliency and expediency.)

  It helped that Theodorus was filled with questions about Moon hoaxers. “I just don’t get how they can’t believe facts.”

  “There are still people in the United States, quite a few, I think, who don’t believe the Takisians unleashed the wild card. Some think the whole Takisian attack was a total hoax.”

  “By who?”

  “The Nazis, the Russians, our own government. I’ve heard all three.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “You’re going to learn, if you haven’t already, that many people are quite stupid. And here’s some advice: You can’t change their minds by telling them the truth, or facts. All you can do is avoid them.”

  “And hope they don’t reproduce.”

  I laughed. Theodorus had a sharp mind and was beginning to display some wit.

  “Oh, I have something for you.” He handed me a manila folder stuffed with a quarter inch of paper.

  “What’s all this?”

  “The life and times of Bertram Neal.”

  I opened the folder and took out half a dozen newspaper clippings, a typed “bio,” and a few odd flyers for Neal movies and speaking engagements.

  I read the bio first, learning that Neal was thirty, a Kentucky native who was prominent in joker rights—at least to the extent that he’d been arrested—and had no education beyond high school.

  His conspiracy-skepticism wasn’t just limited to my flight to the Moon, but included the exploits of the Four Aces (“hyped nonsense”). As for what he did when he wasn’t harassing me—“He’s a chimney sweep?”

  “He has a business where he repairs roofs and things like that. Does that make a difference?”