Meet Me in the Moon Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

time?
    Up the street, Sam saw Craig Taft and his father, Walter, each struggling with the end of a long pole onto which a big sow had been tied by her legs. They stopped some ten feet in front of the monster and lowered the pig to the ground. Craig’s father took a big red-checked handkerchief from his back pocket, mopped his face, and then wandered away to talk to a group of men out in front of Bert’s Barber Shop.
    Craig knelt and rubbed the sow’s belly and sagging teats. Sam knew Craig hated losing one of his pigs, every one of which he’d given a name to, but the monster had to be fed, and it was his turn. Long ago, before they’d taken to feeding her regularly, she had walked, and on those walks, she gobbled up Mr. Ramsey’s entire gaggle of geese, a donkey, and little Billy Boshkin. Better she squat rooted in the square.
    Sam pushed away from the wall of the Oxblood and walked over to Craig and his snorting sow. Craig was a big man with powerful arms and legs. His wheat-colored hair stuck up in the back, and his face was boyish, somehow sweet. He looked up when Sam touched his shoulder. Tears, like jewels, had gathered at the corners of his eyes. He turned his eyes quickly back down at the sow.
    “There, there, Big Betty,” he said. “No trouble. You just take it easy, old girl.”
    Sam squatted down on his heels by Craig. “Something you can do for me.”
    “Ain’t the time, Sammy.”
    “Got to be now,” Sam said. “It’s no big deal.”
    Craig didn’t look up from Big Betty’s pink and brown speckled belly.
    Sam squeezed Craig’s shoulder. “How far you figure you could throw me, Craig?”
    “Throw you?” Craig, looking interested in spite of himself, turned his face up to Sam.
    “Yeah. Well, suppose you was to get down on one knee and cup your hands and I was to come running and you was to, you know, toss me? How far you figure you could throw me?”
    “Skinny butt-head like you, Sammy, I could throw to the moon.”
    “Don’t need to go that far.” Sam jerked his chin up at the monster’s trunk. “Just want to get me one of those bananas.”
    “You crazy?”
    “You know the answer to that one, old son.” Sam grinned and punched Craig on the shoulder. “So will you do it? You toss the bacon here. Then real quick-like you kneel, and I come running.”
    “Don’t call her that.”
    “What?”
    “Big Betty. Bacon.”
    “Yeah, right. Right. Well, will you do it?”
    “So, why don’t you just wait until she’s fed and sleepy and climb up from the back? You could get too high to reach before she knew what was happening.”
    “Where’s the sport in that? Come on, work with me here.”
    Craig looked around at Escotilla’s assembled citizenry. “They ain’t gonna like it.”
    Sam punched him in the arm. “Do they ever? But old Mike there’ll like it. Liable to swallow his horn. And Lila.” He leered at Craig and wiggled his eyebrows up and down. “You know Lila will get a kick out of it. And you and me’ll like it. The Terrible Five ride again!”
    “Four,” Craig said. “The Terrible Four.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “No, you said . . .”
    Sam cut him off. “So will you do it?” Craig’s father separated himself from his barbershop cronies and ambled back to help toss the pig. “Hurry up, Craig. Tell me you’ll do it.”
    “Your funeral,” Craig said, and shrugged.
    Sam slapped Craig on the shoulder again and got to his feet. “That’s my man.” He stepped back to give himself some running room.
    Craig’s father took up one end of the pole and Craig took up the other. Big Betty struggled and squealed. Mike on the bandstand waved his hands at his ragtag troop of musicians: Spanish guitar, fiddle, French horn, and tuba. He put the trumpet to his lips, and the band leaped, like a startled deer, into a song.
    Mike lowered his trumpet and sang: “Yes, she has no bananas. She has no bananas today!”
    The monster roared.
    Sam put his hands on his knees and got