By Vincent Zandri
Moonlight Weeps
(*) Coming soon
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Here’s a sample from Trey R. Barker’s Death is Not Foever.
1
He dreamed...
“A mustache, Mariana?”
She was dead, she was a dream, but his wife was still a young girl dancing on the desert breeze.
“Something different.” Her mustache was thin and curled and reminded him of a melodrama villain.
“A little, yeah.” The Judge twirled with her, his big feet stumbling in his beige cowboy boots, toes scuffed from desert rock.
“I miss yours.” Mariana smiled, looked at him through the tops of her eyes.
It had been one of the things she loved best. He’d had it from before they’d met until well after she died. In fact, the real Mariana, flesh and blood, had never seen him sans mustache. Only in his dreams, when he conjured her from deep in his soul and gave her voice and life by what he knew was his head full of delusions, did she see him without his mustache.
She laughed, a sound as sweet as pecan pie. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He dipped her to music only they heard. “Don’t see a mustache on many women.”
“I grew it to remind me of yours. Or maybe I joined the circus...the mustachioed lady.”
“Got a circus in Heaven, do they?”
“That where you think I am?”
The Judge stopped dancing. “Aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Probably in hell, too, though.”
Knowing it was heavy and boring in its banality, Judge Bean sighed. “As long as we’re separated...I am, too.”
“Jeremiah...you never found it, did you?”
He avoided her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
She kissed his cheek. “It’s okay, honey, it’s just a piece of tin.”
“Helluva lot more than that.”
In this dream, they were on their first date again: that incredible spring night when the air inside the Barefield Country Club smelled of honeysuckle and warm dust. The band was on fire, tearing through old big band tunes that both of them knew from their parents’ record collections. Saxophones jumped double time, never out of synch, while trumpets wailed over everything and the drummer and bass player laid down a foundation that made Bean’s chest thump.
Tables sat in the back half of the room, more a place for people’s drinks while they danced rather than a place to eat dinner. On each table were electric candles inside tall glasses. It gave the entire room an eerie cast, light flickering against the walls, doing its own dance.
And on those walls?
The full-page newspaper ads from the Judge’s first campaign, writ large as wall-sized posters. In one, a rusty 1930s truck sat in a field on blown-out tires. Across the hood of the truck was his opponent’s name. The brutally clear implication was that the Judge’s opponent was not only old, but broken-down and hadn’t any understanding of how the World worked anymore. That one was for the younger voters, to tell them Bean was as cool and hip as they were. In the second ad, an old woman answered her front door on Halloween. A kid, dressed as Bean’s opponent, tells the old lady he’s going to let all the bad guys out of jail so they can break into her house.
“That one was for the older voters,” Mariana said.