magazines and newspapers.
Oh, I used to go there myself, but I haven’t been there in years.
I can assure you.
[Nona]
Some people don’t like the fence project.
They talk, not at breakfast so much.
They’re probably all on The List.
In fact, I thought I saw The List in here the other day on somebody’s table.
I think it was Tulip Booth, three pancakes, coffee, juice. No syrup.
Fifteen-cent tip.
I might have seen some of who was on there.
Ummm.
Sullivan Oh, that one farmer.
The Mexicans.
Linda the fat lifeguard.
I’d call that fat, wouldn’t you?
And my hairdresser, what was her name?
There’s others too.
I suppose.
I didn’t really want to see, but I sure wanted to see if I was on there.
I couldn’t be, I don’t say anything. I don’t talk to anybody. I don’t know anybody.
The lifeguard, I’ve heard about her.
And Jeannie, that’s her name. I was in there the other day. I always go Tuesday morning.
She’s a Vietnam Era Veteran, has an MIA flag tacked to the wall.
The other day she says she saw things over there she doesn’t want to talk about.
Delores says, “You didn’t go to Vietnam, Jeannie. You went to Alabama.”
Jeannie says, “It’s too soon, too soon.”
And Sherman the mail carrier, his hair’s about to his butt by now.
Well, little miss Moon Walking was at the city council meeting last night …
Oh, I’m on break now, seeya later.
You smoke?
[Tommy]
Well, Moon Walking went to city council last night.
She had a physics mid-term the next day so she took her book with.
She’s trying to fight the fences. She said she might get some T-shirts made like the one she made for herself. She wore it to the ol’ meeting.
Fuck The Fences.
I can’t say the “F” word.
When it was her turn she went up to the podium. She left her book on her seat.
She told them why she doesn’t want a fence around the library.
“Even if there is a gate, it’s still the idea of looking like we want to keep people out, or that we want to keep our books in.”
“Sit down.”
“High school kid.”
She said she doesn’t know what the big deal is.
She said that one thousand people get killed every year from lightning and nobody from terrorists, so why the fences and why don’t we make everyone wear antenna hats to deflect the lighting bolts.
One thousand people. Every year, she said, as she sat down.
You could get the shop class to make them and sell them to make money to go woods camp in the summer or whatever.
If it saves one thousand lives every year, isn’t that worth it? she said.
“Lock her up.”
People behind her talked while she was talking.
“The whole idea of fences is so wrong,” she shouted from her seat.
“Skinny bitch,” someone said.
“Dead Moon walking.”
[Robert S. Thompson]
Oh, Jan.
Yes, when they came she was at the vacant homeless shelter, cleaning.
Jeannie was at her shop, working on Mrs. Jones’ hair.
Michael Sullivan Oh was walking toward his machine shed at four-thirty in the morning.
Linda the lifeguard had just pulled her car in to the parking lot at the swimming pool to shut everything down for the winter. She was sitting in the front seat lighting a cigarette when they appeared at both windows.
And Seymour the movie theater proprietor was perched precariously on a new ladder setting up the marquee for the showing of “How High Were My Fences,” when the white van went by taking them all to Abu Iowa.
And The Swarm. Good God.
There’s a lot of talk about them these days.
Little shits.
There’s ads now for a new head lifeguard, and the beauty salon is for sale. And the lonely people’s shelter is going to be a Taco Bell, I heard, if they can get the TIF approved.
Lots of opportunity, things happening.
Shows a vibrant economy.
Some at the UU Church said they’ve had a few new people in church these past weeks. Prison guards, fence construction types, individual netting developers.
That’s encouraging as well.
[Nona]
Hi.
The Swarm never comes in here.
No money.
But they go past the windows all the time, across the lot.
The boss says it looks like an amoeba on a slide, or a group of black birds, forming, swooping, re-forming.
Nobody can catch ‘em.
I heard someone say yesterday —I had my hands and arms filled with Denver Omelet Special plates — why try?
Why try to catch them?
I stopped and stared.
It was Brigitte, Jeannie the hairdresser’s sister.
Jeannie! That’s her name.
I stared right at her. She didn’t notice me, just puffed and flicked her ash.
I didn’t say anything, ‘cause I was too busy.
Brigitte. I wonder where she’s from. Hmmm. Brigitte … that sound Nebraskan to you?
And they all think I don’t hear, but I hear everything … but what I thought the whole rest of the morning was … why?
What’s The Swarm hurt by going over fences, around fences, under fences.
At the end of the day it’s all the same.
Everyone’s sitting in their houses watching their TV’s, staring out the windows, wiggling their toes.
What’s the dif?
Moon Walking and her mom were in here a couple hours ago.
Saturday, no school.
Her mother’s name is Regina. She ‘s not so bad.
They asked me to sit down and smoke and drink coffee and eat pie.
It was still morning menu, but they wanted pie, so we had banana crème pie, Marlboros and mocha Java.
We sat in Blueberry Booth, next to the gumball machine and the shopper’s guide rack.
Moon Walking thinks they will make her put up a fence at the library, and her mother thinks she’ll probably wake up one morning and there will be twelve big guys in her front yard putting up a fence around her home.
I didn’t say, but I thought they might want to think about a lot more than that.
The Roy Scouts have coffee in here every afternoon. We have to close the place down for an hour. I put out coffee, rolls, not supposed to hang around, but I’m not going to go all the way home, get all comfortable, just to have to come back here by four.
So, I do dishes, I smoke in the kitchen. I’ve got my book.
There’s a new billboard up right outside.
It’s a big one.
It’s the Open Your Eyes campaign by the Roy Scouts.
The signs are all over town, billboards, house windows, church bulletin stuffers.
The kids bring ‘em home from school, too.
[Robert S. Thompson]
Ms. Moon Walking was headed to the library, walking from school.
Don pulled up in the cruiser on the curb.
He called M.W. over.
Then the new bicycle cops came up behind her and behind them was a black undercover SUV with clouded windows.
Two black helicopters appeared overhead, hovering, shaking down leaves, making everything smell like helicopter oil and leaf dust.
They took Moon Walking to the jail.
Nobody could talk to her or see her.
They told her mother that she wasn’t even in there, but she was ‘cause Tommy that kid on the bike saw them take her.
Tommy told me just a few minutes ago that The Swarm saw it happen as w
ell and followed the officer’s car all the way to the jail.
The Swarm comprises dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of Jimmy’s, Judy’s, Reynaldo’s, Achmad’s, Wayne’s. No one really knows.
They seem like an “it” because that’s what they’re called, The Swarm, and it’s seen as one thing, a thing.
However, The Swarm is really a bunch of who’s and if it were possible to catch it, stop it, put it under a microscope in Mr. Blueberry’s botany lab you would see about a million different faces, some smiling, some angry, some ugly as hell, some too beautiful to behold.
And so that’s why it is possible to imagine, not just possible, but wholly inevitable, that The Swarm had a heart.
It cared. About something. Everyone cares about something.
Right?
And, as it turns out … The Swarm cared about Moon Walking.
[Robert S. Thompson]
Day in and day out The Swarm buzzed the jail.
“What’s that noise?” said one of Moon Walking’s jailers.
The Swarm went around and around, over the top and tried to go under.
The Swarm grew larger, and it sounded more like a machine humming, at least during the day. At night it sounded like locusts, or one locust, one big, breathing, loud, buzzing, buzzing, whirring, humming … thinking.
Hmmmm. Hmmm. Hmmmm.
Inside the jail, Moon Walking tried to see in the dark.
She sat in her cell on the cement floor against the wall. She figured it was the north wall. It was far away from the door, where the slot of light shined at meal times.
She often saw eye shine in the light shaft inside the door.
She imagined things like voices or faces and smells and she felt things like falling from a cold mountain top and water skiing and falling to the bottom of a lake, and hanging.
Through the leaked gossip of the jailers over the days she learned that a kindergartner with plastic explosives in his Depends had been caught just prior to blowing the cafeteria to kingdom come.
And that bottled water, shampoo, toothpaste and Sweet Tarts were no longer allowed on any mini-vans anywhere in town, due to inside information obtained regarding their possible use in ruining the carpeting of the vehicles.
I heard that a reporter from the newspaper, just out of college, was driving around, trying to do research for a column on