Winter Moon

Crawford shrugged. "Well, by the time they're done building him up, I

suspect he'll have been an antidrug crusader, a tireless advocate for

the homeless--" Jack picked it up: "A devout Christian who once

considered dedicating his life to missionary work--" until Mother

Teresa told him to make movies instead--"

"--and because of his

effective efforts on behalf of justice, he was killed by a conspiracy

involving the CIA, the FBI--"

"--the British royal family, the

International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Pipe Fitters--"

"--the

late Joseph Stalin--"

"--Kermit the Frog--"

"--and a cabal of

pill-popping rabbis in New Jersey," Jack finished.

They laughed because the situation was too ridiculous to respond to

with anything but laughter--and because, if they didn't laugh at it,

they were admitting the power of these people to hurt them.

"They better not put me in this damn movie of theirs," Jack said after

his laughter had devolved into a fit of coughing. "I'll sue their

asses."

"They'll change your name, make you an Asian cop named Wong, ten years

older and six inches shorter, married to a redhead named Bertha, and

you won't be able to sue for spit."

"People are still gonna know it was me in real life."

"Real life? What's that? This is Lala Land."

"Jesus, how can they make a hero out of this guy?"

Crawford said, "They made heroes out of Bonnie and Clyde."

"Antiheroes."

"Okay, then, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

"Still." i

"They made heroes out of Jimmy Hoffa and Bugsy Siegel.

Anson Oliver's a snap."

That night, long after Lyle Crawford had gone, when Jack tried to

ignore his thousand discomforts and get some sleep, he couldn't stop

thinking about the movie, the million dollars, the harassment Toby had

taken at school, the vile graffiti with which their house had been

covered, the inadequacy of their savings, his disability checks, Luther

in the grave, Alma alone with her arsenal, and Anson Oliver portrayed

on-screen by some young actor with chiseled features and melancholy

eyes, radiating an aura of saintly compassion and noble purpose

exceeded only by his sex appeal.

Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness far worse than anything

he had felt before. The cause of it was only partly the claustrophobic

confinement of the body cast and the bed. It arose, as well, from the

fact that he was tied to this City of Angels by a house that had

declined in value and was currently hard to sell in a recessionary

market, from the fact that he was a good cop in an age when the heroes

were gangsters, and from the fact that he was unable to imagine either

earning a living or finding meaning in life as anything but a cop. He

was as trapped as a rat in a giant laboratory maze. Unlike the rat, he

didn't even have the illusion of freedom.

On June sixth the body cast came off. The spinal fracture was entirely

healed.

He had full feeling in both legs. Undoubtedly he would learn to walk

again.

Initially, however, he couldn't stand without the assistance of either

two nurses or one nurse and a wheeled walker. His thighs had

withered.

Though his calf muscles had received some passive exercise, they were

atrophied to a degree. For the first time in his life, he was sore and

flabby in the middle, which was the only place he'd gained weight.

A single trip around the room, assisted by nurses and a walker, broke

him out in a sweat and made his stomach muscles flutter as if he had

attempted to benchpress five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, it was a

day of celebration. Life went on. He felt reborn.

He paused by the window that framed the crown of the tall palm tree,

and as if by the grace of an aware and benign universe, a trio of sea

gulls appeared in the sky, having strayed inland from the Santa Monica

shoreline. They hovered on rising thermals for half a minute or so,

like three white kites. Suddenly the birds wheeled across the blue in

an aerial ballet of freedom and disappeared to the west. Jack watched

them until they were gone, his vision blurring, and he turned away from

the window without once lowering his gaze to the city beyond and below

him.

Heather and Toby visited that evening and brought Baskin-Robbins

peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. In spite of the flab around his

waist, Jack ate his share.

That night he dreamed of sea gulls. Three. With gloriously wide

wingspans. As white and luminous as angels. They flew steadily

westward, soaring and diving, spiraling and looping spiritedly, but

always westward, and he ran through fields below, trying to keep pace

with them. He was a boy again, spreading his arms as if they were

wings, zooming up hills, down grassy slopes, wildflowers lashing his

legs, easily imagining himself taking to the air at any moment, free of

the bonds of gravity, high in the company of the gulls. Then the

fields ended while he was gazing up at the gulls, and he found himself

pumping his legs in thin air, over the edge of a bluff, with pointed

and bladed rocks a few hundred feet below, powerful waves exploding

among them, white spray cast high into the air, and he was falling,