Free Name Games by Michael Craft

with “Official” plates. I thought at first it might be Doug Pierce, but his sedan was a lighter shade of beige. A man was driving, and he had a passenger, but I couldn’t discern their features through the sun’s glare on the windshield. So I pulled over to the opposite curb, cut my engine, and busied myself with a few notes, waiting to see who’d emerge from the other car.
    I recognized the passenger as soon as she stepped out onto the parkway. A gust of wind caught her cape and furled it over her head, making a further mess of her ratted gray hair—she looked like a wayward witch making a clumsy landing from Oz. It was none other than Miriam Westerman, founder and leader of Fem-Snach. Attempting to unruffle the cape, she clattered a giant primitive necklace that weighed heavily upon her flat bodice.
    Then the other door opened and the driver stepped onto the street. The sun gleamed blue on his jet-black hair, which was surely dyed, worn in an outdated pompadour. When the pesky breeze got hold of it, he looked like a poodle in a suit. This was Harley Kaiser, Dumont County’s distinguished district attorney. While closing the car door, he tried to finger-comb his hair, but without success—now he looked like a poodle with a Mohawk.
    Admittedly, my vision of these two characters was tainted by prejudice.
    Miriam was the woman who had tried to steal custody of Thad from me. She was the woman who had instigated a hate-mail campaign against me when I first moved to Dumont, branding my homosexuality an “abomination against Mother Nature”—never mind her own past flirtations with lesbianism, which was just dandy in her book, since it didn’t involve men. She was the woman I had bodily thrown from my home one evening when she invaded a family gathering and spat epithets at me, including the rather clever “penis cultist.” And she was the woman who sought to violate the civil liberties of an entire community because pornography, in her view, was tantamount to “violence against women.” Miriam Westerman openly hated me. In the face of such irrational animosity, I could only return the sentiment.
    Kaiser was a different matter. As an elected official, he was instinctively sensitive to public opinion, accountable to every voter, or at least to fifty-one percent of them. Further, he was smart enough to recognize that he stood nothing to gain by antagonizing the publisher of the local paper. So he at least made an attempt to behave cordially to me, in spite of our polar disagreement regarding the enforcement of obscenity standards. As far as he was concerned, I had no grasp of political reality. As far as I was concerned, he’d landed on the wrong side of the issue, period, and I marveled at his lack of principle in selling out the First Amendment for the sake of some presumed political advantage. My friend Roxanne Exner had hit the nail on the head in her succinct appraisal of the district attorney: Harley Kaiser was a hot dog.
    I had previously called Kaiser and Miriam “strange bedfellows” in their alliance to rid Dumont of porn. Now, watching them from my car, I found their pairing all the more unlikely. What were they up to? Why here? Why now?
    They were doubtless asking themselves the same questions about me. Standing at the curb, they spoke over their shoulders to each other, glancing at my car, which anyone in town would recognize. So I let them continue wondering for a few moments, hoping that my presence would unsettle them. Behind tinted windows, I wrote a few last notes, then capped my pen, returning it with the pad to my jacket.
    Opening the door, I got out of the car, donning a pair of sunglasses (the autumnal slant of midmorning light was not especially bothersome—in fact, I enjoyed it—but I figured the dark glasses might make me a tad more menacing). Pretending to notice them just then, I called to the opposite curb, “Miriam, Harley—what a pleasant surprise.” It was a good act, but in