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Freezing Moon

Roy K. Felps

Tony’s schedule on Friday was so simple it required only three words in his daily planner: WORK, WINDOW, and MOON. He had taken care of the first word, with all of its implications and restrictions, during the day. He was alternating between the second two, squatting beneath the fire escape stairs directly across from the bedroom window of his apartment, when the light went off in the kitchen. A few seconds later, the light came on in the bedroom. He lit a cigarette and leaned forward. He knew this was the part where he was supposed to pay attention.

The bedroom window was on the fifteenth floor and looked out over a fire escape just like the one Tony was stinking up with his highly illegal, hand-rolled cigarette. Both buildings loomed over a trash-filled alley connecting two of the city’s busiest streets. The alley was open at both ends, with an overflowing metal dumpster next to the fire escape where Tony had been sitting for the past two hours. The sunken, lumpy asphalt was cracked and filled with dark puddles of filthy water. The alley was filled with trash. Between city budget cuts, union strikes, and the neighborhood’s well-deserved reputation as a good place to get into trouble in a hurry, it was a wonder the city’s sanitation department bothered with the block at all. Even when they did, they made only the most desultory attempts to keep the alley clean. For the past two months they had only gone as far as to empty the dumpster, and then only five times.

This meant the alley was still filled with the scattered and rotting reminders of a maintenance worker’s union strike that had resulted in both buildings living with a broken elevator for two weeks. Three days into the strike, residents of the upper floors on both sides had started dumping their trash into the alley from the fire escapes, showering the ground with bags that broke apart as soon as they hit the ground. The rest of the litter came from furtive couplings – some voluntary, some not – and various muggings and drug deals gone bad, and from the wild dogs that scavenged in the garbage late at night.

Normally Tony would have refrained from lighting up, no matter how bad the place smelled, but the alley was such a notoriously hellish war zone that he was fairly confident it wouldn’t be a problem. Even if a cop somehow managed to see him up there in the darkness, puffing away, he doubted the cop was going to be crazy enough to risk getting killed over somebody smoking on a fire escape. Especially since the two men standing at the bottom of the fire escape, not far from the dumpster the three of them had moved earlier that night so he could climb up there in the first place, were known tough guys who could be counted on to show just how unimpressed they were by cops.

He watched the bedroom window, smoke swirling around his head. The window had no outer ledge, but it also had no screen, and the yellowing blinds had been pulled halfway up, offering him an excellent view of the room. The landing he sat on was higher than his bedroom window, so he was only able to see his wife and her guest from the neck down. He didn’t have any problem telling them apart, however, especially after they took off their clothes. He studied the ledge on the other side of the window, where he saw a colorful jumble of small plastic toys and figurines. He smoked as he waited.

He saw them come together in a long embrace and kiss, then her guest turned down the sheets and got into the bed as she walked over to the window and clutched at the shade. He saw the man light a cigarette in the background as his wife arranged the toys into an odd but humorous form of semaphore. When she was finished, the four objects lined up were a dollhouse toilet with a white bowl and pink lid, the smiling traffic cop from a Fischer-Price parking garage, a tiny stuffed parrot, and a small green plastic hippo. He understood her message: The dinner had been less than impressive, the movie had been okay, and her guest had a big mouth, but he appeared to make up for it in other ways. He had guessed the last part already, having seen the man as he was getting into bed. The green hippo reassured him. She looked across the alley at him and winked, pressing a button on the hippo’s head. He chuckled as its red eyes buzzed on and off. Then she pulled the shade down and he settled back to wait. He lit another cigarette and turned his attention to the freezing moon far above.

 ***

 His peculiar obsession with the moon was something even his closest friends and wife found completely inexplicable. The only thing they understood was that it was best to let him ramble periodically on the subject and nod indulgently in all the right places. It was considered unwise, even dangerous, to mock his moon worship.

There was absolutely nothing in his background to explain his endless fascination with the moon and his near-pagan ramblings on the subject. He was in his late thirties, raised in a constant succession of project housing apartments, slums, army bases, foster homes, and reform schools. He had displayed no particular interest in science, much less any other subject that required his actual presence, for the few years he sporadically attended public school until he woke up one morning after his third trip through the sixth grade and decided he’d had enough of school. He appeared to care about little other than drugs, guns, fucking, hitting people, and occasionally playing lead guitar in a band whose members had all met in prison. He had enough talent for drugs, guns, and hitting people to keep him living reasonably well, and was successful enough to have been married for several years to a woman who shared his enthusiasm for the fucking part. He continued to play in the band, although his guitar skills didn’t appear to be improving.

There was nothing in his life or history to explain why, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, he had begun to creep out of the apartment at night to stare up into the sky for hours, watching the moon. Given his general appearance, prior convictions for drug offenses, and the whacked-out shit that came from his mouth about the moon and the stars and the hole in the lake of the sky, it was not surprising that everyone in the neighborhood thought he was at the peak of some tremendous drug habit. The cops searched him every time they saw him standing around with his face turned up to the moon. His wife started hiding the pipe and lighter when he began rhapsodizing about the silver dollar lighting up the night sky. None of this deterred him. Eventually they decided he had lost his mind, for reasons unknown, on the subject of the moon, but was otherwise relatively sane, or at least no different than he had been before suddenly turning into the Moon Fairy. By the time they reached this conclusion, though, it was also an article of faith among them that when Tony began the moon dance, it was time to leave the room.

He liked jobs that took him outside at night, giving him plenty of opportunity to moongaze. His work – at the moment, anyway – consisted mainly of what his employer liked to call “securing the area” for imminent drug deals. This usually entailed leading a small horde of thugs into some relatively secluded area and ensuring, by force if necessary, that business transactions could be conducted safely and in private, with no annoying witnesses or unexpected visitors with guns. These expeditions into parts of the city that were already off the beaten path generally involved lots of waiting around once a suitable “conference room” – an empty office, warehouse, or other place with at least one well-lit area – had been “reserved,” his employer’s cute term for seizing temporary control of some largely abandoned or unobserved part of the city. Before growing obsessed with the moon, Tony had favored warehouses, offices in strip malls, and government parking lots; now he favored park benches in a nearly-forgotten part of Harvey Park, lit with a portable halogen lamp, which he refused to allow anybody to turn on until the dealers arrived. He explained to one of his thugs that didn’t want the lamp’s glow to detract from the moon bathing them in pale blue fire. The thug thought these were the words of a lunatic, but he had better sense than to say as much to Tony.

Tony’s barely-focused gaze drifted over to the bedroom window. It was still dark. Nothing appeared amiss, so he let his eyes roll back up toward the glowing white disc in an unbroken night sky that was black and liberally salted with stars.

***

Movement caught his eye. He looked back across the alley and saw the bedroom window was open. The room was dark, but the window was open. The man was fully dressed, holding a pillowcase in one hand. He knocked the hippo off the ledge and into the alley as he crawled out the window and set one foot on the fire escape railing below him. As he carefully lowered himself out of the window, Tony pulled a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. When the phone continued to ring with no answer, he stood up and leaned over the railing. He rattled the fire escape until the two men looked up at him. He pointed to the alley openings and the men immediately understood. They trotted off in different directions as he began to descend the fire escape three steps at a time, still waiting for an answer on the other end of the cell phone.

***

Robin was impressed with himself for having gotten out of the window and down the fire escape without attracting any attention. He hugged the wall and started to move out of the alley, but slowed his pace when he saw the man slouching against the wall at the end. The man was watching him, massive arms folded across a barrel chest and half hidden under cascading waves of long, dark hair. He turned left and started to move in that direction instead. He stopped when he realized that the tall, thin man standing in the middle of the alley entrance with his hands behind his back was watching him as well. He paused, frozen with steadily mounting panic as the tall man marched forward, his arms coming into view as they swung at his side. His right hand held a two-foot length of iron pipe. Light gleamed off the dome of his bald skull as he closed in on Robin, his wicked smile widening sufficiently to reveal several gray and rotting teeth.

He turned back toward the other man and nearly jumped when he found the man standing next to him. He smelled like motor oil and sweat and his leather jacket was festooned with pins of metal bands with rude names and nearly indecipherable logos. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from one pocket and lit up. He put them back and pulled a folding knife from his other pocket. The knife flicked open with a loud snap, exposing a large blade that gleamed with all sorts of unpleasant promise beneath the sick glare of vapor lights outside the alley. He blew smoke in Robin’s face, laughing when Robin began to cough.

The skinhead was hovering over him when his coughing spasm subsided. The skinhead poked at the pillowcase with the pipe.

“What you got in here, friend?”

Robin pulled the pillowcase back without even thinking about it. “I’m not your friend,” he said, trying to sound tough.

            The longhair sneered. “That’s too bad,” he said. “Because, see, only friends of ours are supposed to be hanging out here. And you don’t look like anybody I ever saw around here, dude. Bad, bad, bad.”

The skinhead giggled. “Of course, we might be, uh, willing to overlook the fact that your ass is where it most definitely shouldn’t be. For a generous donation, of course.” He prodded Robin’s stomach with the pipe. “Real generous, if you know what I mean. Real, real generous.”

“How generous?” Robin’s eyes were wide with nervous fear. He was prickly with sweat. An insane itch on the back of his neck gnawed at his nerves, an itch he was afraid to scratch. He clutched the pillowcase to his body like a shield.

He was saved from a concrete, maybe even physical, answer by the sound of a man jumping from the fire escape across the alley onto the dumpster. They all turned at the sound, and Robin saw a large man in jeans and a black t-shirt crouch unsteadily on a slanted pile of trash. Then he jumped into the alley, landing with his knees bent, and walked over to them. He was almost as tall as the thin man and nearly as wide as the longhair, wearing a black t-shirt with DOPESICK stenciled across it in white letters over a collage of unpleasant images. His arms were huge, covered in even more unpleasant tattoos down to each wrist. A gold wedding band gleamed as his left hand swung at his sides. He wore no other jewelry.

He stared down at Robin. He made a fist with one hand and poised it just inches from Robin’s stomach. “What’s in the pillowcase?”

Robin started to speak, and found that he couldn’t. He was tearing up when the man snorted with contempt and yanked the pillowcase from his hand. He looked inside for a long moment, the items in the pillowcase rattling with a tinny clank, and stared down at Robin again. His eyes were cold and distant, his face like stone.

“You better have a real good explanation for why all this stuff of Brenda’s is in this pillowcase. I’ll give you a hint. Every time you lie, I’m going to hit you.”

Robin started to weep. “I’m sorry,” he bawled. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. Please don’t hurt me.”

“You do anything to Brenda? You better hope you didn’t, because if you did, I’m going to fuck you up real bad.”

This brought on another weeping spell that only subsided when Tony slapped him. “I just… I… I didn’t hurt her, I just… please, God! Don’t hit me again….”

The skinhead giggled when Tony slapped him again. Robin looked over the longhair’s shoulder and saw a man in a long coat. The man had stopped to gawk at the spectacle unfolding in the alley. As soon as he realized he was being watched, he turned his head and walked briskly down the sidewalk, not looking back.

Tony started to hit him again, then stopped when the phone rang. He opened it up and listened. Then he shut it carefully, dropped it in his pocket, and hit Robin in the stomach hard enough to make him bark as he bounced off the wall.

“We’re going upstairs,” he said, already starting down the alley. “Bring him along. Deena went over to check on Brenda. That was her on the phone.” He looked back over his shoulder, glaring at Robin. “Things don’t look too good for you, man.”

Robin had begun to openly sob as the two men prodded him along, following at a short distance as Tony disappeared around the corner.

***

They were upstairs long enough to find that Deena had entered the apartment to find Brenda tied to all four corners of the bed and screaming around a ball gag. She had been understandably hysterical once Deena managed to free her, and had only calmed down when Tony appeared and talked to her in the bedroom while the rest of them waited in the living room. Deena joined the two men in standing around glaring at Robin, who was curled up on the couch, still weeping.

When Tony finally emerged from the bedroom, he looked grim. He whispered to Deena and she went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

He looked at them, silent, his stony face offering no clue as to his thoughts. The room was silent as he lit a joint. Several minutes passed as the three men standing took turns smoking it down to the roach, which the longhair snuffed between two fingers and dropped in the vest pocket of his leather jacket.

Tony pointed to the door. “Upstairs.”

The skinhead grabbed Robin around one arm and jerked him to his feet. He shoved Robin into the door. They all moved in his direction as he leaned against the cold oak frame, his face wet, shuddering.

***

 Robin woke up face down on the gravel rooftop, his hands tied behind his back, his mouth filled with the same ball gag he had used on Brenda. He flopped over on his side and looked around, his eyes wild, grunting around the bright red plastic ball thrust deep into his mouth and strapped down so tightly that the buckles dug into his cheek. The longhair was sitting on the fire escape landing, smoking a cigarette. The skinhead was sitting on a metal box that was part of the jumble of rectangular metal boxes surrounding the stairway door. The light in the stairwell was on, illuminating a bare concrete landing and stairs descending into darkness. The glass door was closed, blocked by the skinhead, who leaned against it with a bottle of beer in one hand and a half-eaten cheeseburger in the other.

Somewhere behind him he heard Tony’s voice. “Sleeping Beauty is with us now.”

The skinhead giggled. “He is, isn’t he? Looks scared shitless, doesn’t he?”

The longhair joined him in laughing, pointing at Robin’s stained pants. “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you sure that’s all he had in him? Hit him again and see.”

“Sure,” the skinhead said. “Just as soon as I finish eating here, okay?”

Tony’s voice floated over him again. “You sure worked up an appetite, didn’t you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody inhale their fries quite like that.”

The cheeseburger was almost gone. The skinhead grew visibly animated as he spoke, pausing only to eat. “Well, look. Just look at him. You think that kind of work comes without effort? I’m telling you, beating the shit out of people is just like, you know, that exercise jazz your wife does all the time.”

“Well, I don’t know. You sure seem to enjoy your exercise a lot more than she does, that’s for sure.”

“It’s a lot more fun, yeah.” The cheeseburger was gone. He stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. The longhair lurched to his feet, throwing his cigarette to the ground.

Each one grabbed one of his arms. Their rough treatment nearly yanked his right arm out of the socket. His shirt and lower arms were caked in dirt and dried blood. He squealed as they jerked him rudely off the rooftop and turned him around in the air, slamming him back into the gravel on his knees. His pained wail was muffled severely by the ball gag, and he doubted anybody on the ground below could hear it. Even if they did, it wasn’t likely they would do anything about it, even if they could tell where the sound was coming from.

He blinked back tears and saw that Tony was standing in front him, his enormous arms at his side. The tattoos on Tony’s right arm were nothing but crosses and portraits of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and angels of all sizes and descriptions, all floating in a bed of elaborate tribal designs. The tattoos on the other arm were all frightening, a cavalcade of horned demons, some with enormous breasts, others with enormous penises, all with black wings. The demons cavorted among an enormous mound of dead bodies, all with their eyes missing and blood streaming from the sockets. Above the demons, two winged nuns wearing nothing but gas masks and large strap-on dildos were engaged in a rude act.

He didn’t look up; he was afraid of what he might see if he did. In fact, he was afraid to move at all. He waited, his entire body a floating sea of agony that came and went in waves, wincing from time to time at the pain in his cracked ribs. All he could see were arms, and beyond that, the dim glow of vapor lights, the rooftop skyline, and the night sky.

The arms shifted again, the angels and demons coming into focus as Tony stepped up to him. “So,” Tony said, “here’s my problem. You and my wife, had you just stopped at the date and fucking, like you were supposed to, that would have been fine. I’m cool with that. But this part, this extra part you sort of forgot to mention to Brenda, this part about fucking threatening her with a gun and tying her up and doing something you knew she didn’t want to do, then ripping us off on top of that – well, you know, that part I’m not so cool with. In fact, that part kind of pisses me off, to be real honest.”

Robin began to blubber again, helpless.

“God,” the skinhead said, his voice thick with loathing. “No offense, dude, but what did your wife see in this whining sack of shit? Is he hung or something?”

“Oh yeah,” Tony replied. “Outside of that, I’m not sure. My wife has a more generous way of looking at people than I do.”

“Man. She can do way better than this.” The skinhead slapped him on the back of the head, hard enough to make him blubber again.

The longhair lit another cigarette. “You know what just occurred to me, Tony? That if Conrad hadn’t gone out of town, we could have called him up and fed this one to him. He would have loved it. I’ll bet that would have been real entertaining to watch.”

“I’m sure,” Tony said, crossing his arms. His voice was dry. “Yeah, it could be real fun to watch Conrad do to this little shit what he did to my wife. But like you say, he’s out of town. We’ll just have to think of something else.”

The skinhead slapped Robin without warning and clamped his hand around Robin’s face, drawing him close. “Conrad,” he explained with a drunken good humor, “just got out of the state pen. Did seven years for a coke deal gone bad. Cops got shot and his partner got dead, that kind of bad. He got into the habit of taking what he wanted in the slammer, and I’m pretty sure he’d be happy to bend you over the railing here and do you for our amusement. Man, you’re just lucky he’s out of town.”

“Of course,” the longhair said, “you’re still stuck with us. And Tony is pretty unhappy with you. That shit don’t look good, know what I mean?”

“Get him up on his feet,” Tony said, turning and walking to the edge of the roof.

They jerked him upright, springing his cracked ribs. He screamed into the ball gag as they dragged him forward, lapsing into wheezing sobs as they pushed him roughly along until he stood next to Tony looking over the ledge.

“Look,” Tony said, gesturing down at the street below with a sweep of one hand. “See this neighborhood? This is my neighborhood. We play by my kind of rules down here. Not yours. Mine.”

He pointed up into the night sky. Robin looked to where he was pointing. The moon was full, muted behind a pale and shifting veil of gray clouds. “See that? Isn’t that beautiful? It looks like the fishing hole in an endless lake, don’t you think? There’s the fishing hole with water reflecting the light, a hole in black ice. And who knows what’s on the other side?”

He gestured back at the street below them, at the cars and neon signs cluttering up the street at the same level as the telephone poles. “Look at all these crappy buildings and used cars and broken sidewalks and graffiti and broken utility poles and trash. This place is one step away from being hell on earth, but doesn’t it look beautiful in the moonlight? The shadows are so deep, so black, so full of secrets. Yeah. You could get lost in those shadows, forget the hell around you, and just sleep. They go a long way toward hiding the ugliness of the two-legged insects cluttering up this planet. But not far enough.”

“Whoo,” the skinhead said, grinning. “He’s getting philosophical now. Those mail-order courses are paying off.”

Tony ignored him, pointing to the sky. “Up there, it’s still unspoiled,” he said. “Down here these maggots have turned the planet into a fucking toilet, a broken toilet overflowing with filth, but up there it’s still unspoiled. Or close to it. Only a handful of men have ever been there; only a few of their toys remain. If we’re lucky, they’ll never make it back up there before the world ends. Which will probably be soon enough.”

“You’ll have to forgive him,” the longhair said. “He’s kind of a pessimist. If he wasn’t married, I don’t think he’d ever get invited to parties.”

Tony withdrew his arm and looked at the skinhead, then at the longhair. “Should we tell him what he’s won?”

“Sure!” The longhair reached into his pocket and pulled his knife out again. “While you were sleeping, pussycat, we had a little roundtable and a vote about what to do with your sorry ass. I’m happy to inform you that by a unanimous decision, you’ve won a completely free trip to the bottom of the alley.”

The skinhead thumped the pipe in his hand against his leg. “First we’re going to beat on you some more,” he said helpfully. “Then we’re going to poke you with knives and stuff, just to see how long it takes to kill you. We’ve got a pool going on how long you last. Once we’re finished, we’re throwing you off the roof and you can be the city’s problem. If you’re lucky, we’ll leave you with your ID so they can identify you.”

“We have a separate pool going on how long it takes for them to find you,” the longhair confided. “Given the strike, the way people down here don’t like to get mixed up with the cops, and how hard you’ll be to see in all that shit, versus how bad you’re going to reek after a few days, I’m guessing five days, myself.”

Tony was on the phone again. Robin shivered in the cool night air as Tony said a few words. He watched, cold and pale, as Tony listened for a long time. He looked down at the street, where the people were so small they appeared antlike. Even if he managed to survive whatever they were planning to do to him, he knew he’d never live through the impact when he hit the ground far below.

Tony snapped the phone shut. “That was Brenda. She said what she wants is to turn on the news one day next week and hear about this guy being found with something up his ass. She said your pipe would do.”

The longhair shook his head, looking directly at Robin. “Told you it didn’t look good, didn’t I?”

Robin was paralyzed with fear, the enormity of what was in store for him over the next few hours starting to sink in. As they dragged him back from the ledge, their bared teeth and distant eyes shining in moonlight, his body began to shake with racking sobs that only grew more anguished as a violent blow drove him into the gravel lining the roof. The moon burned like a brilliant, freezing hole in a distant lake as they began to kick him. As their boots slapped at his face, he finally understood what Tony had been trying to tell him as the moon grew larger, even larger still, until it swallowed him, plunging him through the hole and into an endless ocean of eternity that grew deeper and darker with each passing moment.

Copyright(c) 2005 by Roy K. Felps

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