Read By the light of the moon for Free Online Page A

face was pink, not cancerously tan,
seamed by excess weight and by time rather than by the merciless
Southwest sun.
    Although his eyes didn't focus on Jilly, and though he wore the
distracted half-smile of someone lost in a jungle of complex but
pleasant thoughts, the man spoke as he approached her: 'If I'm dead
an hour from now, I'd sure regret not having eaten a lot of peanuts
before the lights went out. I love peanuts.'
    This statement was peculiar at best, and Jilly was a young woman
of sufficient experience to know that in contemporary America you
should not reply to strangers who, unbidden, revealed their fears
of mortality and their preferred deathbed snacks. Maybe you were
dealing with a blighted soul who had been made eccentric by the
stresses of modern life. More likely, however, you were being
confronted by a drug-blasted psychopath who wanted to carve a crack
pipe from your femur and use your skin as the cloth for a
decorative cozy to cover his favorite beheading ax. Nevertheless,
perhaps because the guy appeared so harmless, or maybe because
Jilly herself was a tad wiggy after too long a period during which
all her conversation had been conducted with a jade plant, she
replied: 'For me, it's root beer. When my time is up, I want to
cross a River Styx of pure root beer.'
    Failing to acknowledge her response, he drifted serenely past,
surprisingly light on his feet for a man his size, gliding almost
as smoothly as an ice skater, his locomotion in sync with his
half-loco smile.
    She watched him walk away until she was convinced that he was
nothing worse than another weary soul who'd been wandering too long
through the lonely immensity of the Southwest deserts –
perhaps a tired salesman assigned to a territory so vast that it
tested his stamina – dazed by the daunting distances between
destinations, by sun-silvered highways that seemed to go on
forever.
    She knew how he might feel. Part of her unique stage shtick, her
comedic ID, was to present herself as a true Southwest chick, a
sand-sucking cactuskicker who ate a bowl of jalapeno peppers every
morning for breakfast, who hung out in country-music bars with guys
named Tex and Dusty, who was a full sun-ripened woman but also
tough enough to grab a rattlesnake if it dared to hiss at her,
crack it like a whip, and snap its brains out through its eye
sockets. She booked dates in clubs all across the country, but she
spent a significant part of her time in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
and Nevada, staying in touch with the culture that had shaped her,
keeping her shtick sharp, refining her material in front of
boot-stompin' audiences that would relate to every righteous
observation with whoops of approval but would likewise hoot her off
the stage if she tried to pass off ketchup as salsa or if she went
show-biz phony on them. Driving between these gigs was part of
remaining a real and true sandsucker, and although she loved the
barren badlands and the sweeping vistas of silver sage, she
understood how the daunting emptiness of the desert could leave you
smiling as vacuously as a sock puppet, and set you to talking of
death and peanuts to an imaginary friend.
    In the refreshments alcove, the vending machines offered three
brands of diet cola, two brands of diet lemon-lime soda, and diet
Orange Crush, but in the matter of root beer, her choice was
between abstinence or the sugar-packed, big-ass-makin' real stuff.
She pumped quarters with the abandon of a gambling grandma feeding
a hot slot machine, and as three cans clattered one at a time into
the delivery tray, she murmured a Hail Mary prayer, not with a
physiology-related request attached, but just to store up a little
goodwill in Heaven.
    Carrying three cans of soda and a plastic bucket brimming with
ice cubes, she made the short trip back to her room. She'd left the
door ajar in anticipation of having full hands upon her return.
    As soon as she opened a root beer, she'd have to call her mom in
Los Angeles, have a