Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  “I don’t know that I’d call it a lie exactly—”

  “Then what the hell would you call it? You tell me you’re running off to Boulder to campaign with feminists, and I let you go in good faith, figuring it’s important to you even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. Now I find you shacked up with a bunch of good-for-nothing unemployed layabouts! It’s not a lie, it’s a whole goddamned tissue of them!”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Sharna said looking up at him, “this is exactly why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d freak out. You just don’t know them, that’s all. Your generation—”

  “Get out of the car, Sharna. You’re coming home with me.”

  “No, Daddy. I belong with Derek and the commune.”

  Bert ground his teeth together. In his anger, he failed to notice the background chant of No nukes had petered out. “I said get out of the car.”

  Unbidden but vivid visions of his daughter dashed through his head: Slumped on a beanbag in a darkened room, joint in one hand and beer in the other. Writhing around in a depraved orgy, his little girl lost in a snarl of sweaty, thrusting appendages. And those were just two purported hippie pastimes. Who knew what other obscene acts Brolin and his cohorts had exposed Sharna to? The occult, Satanism…the sinister possibilities piled up.

  “Hey, Sheriff. Is there a problem?”

  Bert turned around and found himself eye-to-eye with Brolin. He approximated Bert’s height but carried only a fraction of his thickset poundage. “Yes, there is a problem, sonny, and you’re it. This protest or whatever you call it is over and I’m taking my daughter home where she belongs.”

  Bert stepped past Brolin and marched towards the reactor’s front gates. “You hear me? This protest is officially over. Get back in your cars and go back to where you came from or I’ll charge you all.”

  Voices raised in discontent. Not Marcus Barkley’s voice, however—his cackled in gleeful triumph.

  “What are you going to charge us with?” someone asked.

  “Protesting without a permit, disturbing the peace, trespassing, and anything else that comes up when I search your cars,” Bert said.

  This last threat achieved admirable cut-through. Defiant faces all of a sudden became flat and contemplative. People who for nearly half an hour had chanted in a united voice now broke apart and murmured to one another about “goddamned fascist pigs” and “police states”.

  When he saw his words taking effect, Bert walked back towards Brolin and his daughter. She had gotten out of the car and her hand was pressed against Brolin’s chest. She appeared to be saying something, almost pleading.

  Brolin faced Bert as he approached. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, I had no idea Sharna was your daughter. She didn’t tell me and—”

  “Never mind the damned apologies,” Bert said. “Just get in your car and get the hell out of here. Come on, Sharna.”

  “No, Daddy,” she said. She linked arms with Brolin. “My place is with Derek.”

  As Bert stared down at this intimate connection a red haze fogged his vision. “Sharna, you’re coming home with me if I have to carry you on my shoulder.”

  “With all due respect, Sheriff Grayson, Sharna is twenty-one years old. She can fraternize with whomever she likes.”

  Bert’s ears started to ring. He leveled his gaze at Brolin, and if looks could kill, the man would have been dead on his feet. “You want to watch yourself, boy. You’re treading on thin ice, very thin ice.”

  Brolin’s polite, home-to-meet-the-father demeanor evaporated. “Are you threatening me, Sheriff?”

  “Derek, don’t,” Sharna said.

  “Sharna might be twenty-one, boy, but I’m still her father and I’m also the sheriff of this town. As long as she’s living in Bald Eagle, under my nose, she’ll do as I say. And I say she can do a lot better than fraternizing with the likes of you. Now come along, Sharna.”

  Bert reached out to take his daughter’s arm. As he did so, Brolin pressed a hand against his chest, firm and assertive. Surprised, Bert took a single backward step.

  “Sharna wants to stay with me,” Brolin said.

  Bert looked down at Brolin’s hand as if it were a chancre, then withdrew his pistol from its hip holster and pressed it against Brolin’s chest.

  Brolin jerked back and said, “Jesus!” Some of the activists who had remained to see this drama play out, shouted in protest.

  “I said Sharna is coming with me, and I mean it. I’ve been lenient with you, Brolin, because you haven’t caused any trouble, but now I can see that—”

  “Oh, Daddy, stop it!” Sharna said, stepping forward and slapping down his gun arm. “You’re being thoroughly ignorant. Are you even allowed to pull your gun out like that? Mom would be horrified!”

  The mention of Dana broke Bert’s rage and he gawped at his adult daughter anew. Sharna looked a lot like her mother, and her face dissolved and resolved until it could have been Dana’s stern expression. Kids grow up, he heard her say. The harder you try to make her stay a child, the more you try to control her, the sooner you’re going to lose her. She’d said that when Sharna was fifteen and had come home half an hour late from her first date.

  Bert’s shoulders slumped a little and his eyes fell to the polished tops of his shoes. He slipped his pistol back in its holster and looked up again, switching his gaze between Brolin and his daughter. “This is wrong,” he said. He stemmed an urge to add more, to purge his emotions. “But you stay with Brolin, if that’s what you really want.”

  He reclaimed the step Brolin had stolen. “Just know this: I’ll be keeping a close eye on Bald Eagle Hill from now on. If I have even the smallest hint of probable cause, I won’t hesitate to knock down the door of that old house. We clear?”

  Brolin nodded slowly. “Yes, sir, I think we understand each other.”

  “Now get the rest of these people out of here. And if I see a car with California plates by this time tomorrow, it had better be passing through.”

  “We came here to protest—”

  “I know what you came here to do, and you’ve made your point—although I don’t know who to. Anyway, most of your protestors have already gone.”

  Brolin glanced over his shoulder at the skeleton of activists who remained. “Come on, Sharna,” he said, opening the car door for her. He shouted to the others, “All right everyone, we’re done here.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Sharna said before closing the door. “I’ll be fine, really.”

  Bert watched Brolin get in the car and eyed him as he made a U-turn and drove down the access road. Two or three other cars followed close behind.

  Bert sighed and ambled back towards his cruiser. The reactor’s iron gate slid open and Marcus Barkley emerged, a silly grin splattered over his face. “We showed those goddamned hippies, huh Sheriff? Bunch of nogoodniks, that’s all they are. Up there on the Hill doing God only knows what, while regular, hard-working—”

  Bert opened the cruiser’s door and Barkley had to hop back to avoid ringbarked shins. “Barkley,” Bert said, “why don’t you just shut the hell up?”

  Saturday, August 2, 1969

  Hank Woods emerged onto the porch and breathed crisp pine-scented air. The early morning turned his exhalation into white vapor. Above, a hard blue sky, unflawed by a single cloud, hinted at an Indian summer to come—long, hot days and no snow until at least October, perhaps even November. He slung his green duffle bag over his shoulder and stepped off the stoop.

  As he walked around the homestead he heard the rhythmic thud-thud-crack of wood chopping. In the cleared grassy area just shy of the forest line he found Derek placing another log on the sawn-off tree trunk that served as a chopping block. He swung the ax with a smooth, limber motion and the blade wedged halfway into the log. Derek wiggled it out and raised it for a second strike when he noticed Hank’s approach.

  “Oh, man, that’s right—you leave us today.”

  “Sad to say,” Hank agreed, putting his duffel bag between
his feet. He wore a jacket against the morning chill, but Derek’s thin T-shirt had sweat stains front and back. His wavy hair stuck to his forehead in strands. “I’ve really enjoyed my time here, Derek.”

  “It was my pleasure, man,” he said, resting the ax against the chopping block. “To be honest I was wary when you turned up here in your collar and your shiny shoes, but you fit in real well. We’ll be sorry to see you go. Sure we can’t convince you to stay?”

  Hank shook his head. “I have a real life out there,” he said, glancing towards the track. “Although God knows what state it’s in at the moment. Janine will probably have the divorce papers waiting for me.”

  “So she wasn’t too impressed with your coming here?”

  “I think she envisioned me surrounded by drugged-out, oversexed nymphos—and you can’t blame her, that’s the picture they paint in the media.”

  “Well, you can do something about that now, can’t you?” Derek said, smiling.

  Yes and no, Hank thought to himself. He could now debunk all the occult nonsense that had attached itself to hippie culture, but the rest would be a matter of correcting the rumors and confirming the truth in the half-truths—hippies did smoke marijuana but were not fiends, traditional relationships were frowned upon and casual sex abounded, but squirming, hedonistic orgies were a fabrication of conservative hysteria and nothing more. He could also air some aspects of hippie life that did not lend themselves to tabloid headlines—the horticulture, the arts and crafts, the tenet of respect for each other and the natural world. Nothing The Bald Truth would ever run, but the sort of intricate detail that was the hallmark of a Rolling Stone feature piece. A handsomely paying Rolling Stone feature piece that could rocket a journalist’s reputation into the stratosphere and allow him to work on whatever he liked, whenever he liked, from the comfort of his own home.

  “If I can sell it,” Hank said. “Rolling Stone is a tough market.”

  “You’ll sell it easy. The journalists in this country are just mouthpieces for the government and the military-industrial complex. No one is interested in writing about the truth anymore.”

  Hank stuck out his hand, not wanting to get into a protracted political discussion when the sun had yet to rise above the treetops. “Thanks for the opportunity, anyway. I’ve never been part of a picket-line before.”

  “My pleasure, man,” Derek said, shaking his hand. “Just a shame the fuzz had to come along and spoil all the fun. I thought that stiff was going to burst a blood vessel.”

  Hank laughed. “I’ll write a story on it for the Truth and use that as a quote.” He picked up his duffel bag again. “Well, I’ll see you around, Derek.”

  “Stay cool, man.”

  Hank shouldered his duffel bag and made tracks. A thick pall of smoke now issued from the homestead’s cobbled chimney—Sharna had apparently succeeded in her fire-starting efforts. As he passed through the front yard, the now muted sounds of wood chopping started up again. They seemed farther off than they should have, remnants of a dream from which he was finally waking.

  As he walked through the open gate, Hank turned back to review the gaudy hand-painted sign nailed to the top of a post. It showed the sun, a small rainbow and someone’s interpretation of a dove, below which the words PEACE OUT were written in black capital letters. His stay in the Peace Out commune had been a pleasant and decidedly eye-opening experience.

  In a fit of enthusiasm, Hank had elected to hitchhike (given over to the romantic notion it would somehow be more authentic, put him more in tune with the hippie way of life). Now, with half a mile of track ahead before he reached Main Street, the idea seemed idiotic. A man could walk from one end of Bald Eagle County to the other if necessary (and he would have to if he couldn’t thumb a ride) but it took almost four hours. He was impatient to get home and get started on the article, and his battered old Pontiac sat cold and useless in his garage. A bird chirruped at his approach and lit from its branch.

  “Shut up,” he told it.

  Hank Woods, a real child of the earth.

  As he continued on he worked up some phrases for the article’s introduction. By the time he reached the forest-lined blacktop at the eastern end of Main Street he had begun to enjoy the walk. On the gravel shoulder, outside the shady eminence of the towering pines, the clean morning sun threw its warmth at him. He felt cozy and energized at the same time.

  When he heard the approaching burr of an engine he stuck out his thumb. The driver geared down and Hank chanced a look over his shoulder. The pick-up, its red paint faded to an orange-apricot color, seemed familiar. As it pulled over, Hank realized it belonged to Jim Coultier, a local farmer. Hank popped open the door to Jim’s expectant face. When he saw Hank, his docile features creased in bemusement.

  “I know you. You’re that newspaper guy,” Jim said. “What the hell are you doing hitchhiking in your own town?”

  “I’m out here chasing a story. You don’t mind giving me a ride, do you?”

  “Happy to,” Jim said. “Your car broken down?”

  “No, I hitched out here as well.”

  Hank got in and slammed the heavy door. The utility groaned and rattled as Jim pushed it up to thirty-five miles an hour.

  Jim cleared his throat. “Do you mind if I ask why you decided to hitch your way out to the middle of nowhere on Main Street? Don’t imagine there’s too much to interest the Truth out here.”

  “I was up at the commune on Bald Eagle Hill. Researching an article for Rolling Stone.”

  “For what?”

  “Rolling Stone. You know, the magazine.”

  Jim shook his head. “Never heard of it. Pick up a copy of the Denver Post when I’m out in Darlington,” he said, patting a newspaper on his dashboard. “Which I was this morning, picking up a tractor part. But otherwise it’s just my subscription to Time and whatever you and Larry see fit to print. Farming don’t leave much time for reading, you see. So why’d you hitch out to the Hill anyway? Why didn’t you drive out there?”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”

  Jim chuckled. “Crazy kids,” he said, even though he was probably only ten or twelve years Hank’s senior. “Speaking of crazy kids, what do those hippies get up to? I heard they do all sorts of weird stuff, like orgies.”

  He pronounced it with a hard ‘G’, like the one in organize, and Hank had to muffle a laugh.

  “No, nothing like that,” he said. “They live a little more free and easy than most of us and they probably don’t bathe as often, but that’s about it.”

  “Well, good luck to ’em, I say. I wouldn’t bathe as often, except my wife’d ban me from the bed. Maybe that’s not a bad thing—I could go sleep in the cowshed. Cows don’t nag so much.”

  “I guess not,” Hank said.

  They drove through the town center, Jim moaning in his contented way about wives and bovine diseases and the price of tractor parts. Hank asked him to turn off just before the Eagle Eye Tavern and directed him to a clutch of houses in a cul-de-sac called Featherstone Avenue—Bald Eagle’s answer to a housing tract. Apparently the town planner had intended it to be a real avenue, but money had run out and the street had been sealed into a dead end. Hank quite liked its quirkiness—a misnamed road poking its way to nowhere.

  “Mine’s number eight,” Hank said, pointing to his modest single story house. “Thanks for the ride, Jim.”

  “My pleasure. Good luck with your moss magazine. What was it?”

  “Rolling Stone.”

  “Right…good luck with that.”

  “Thanks. I hope you get your tractor fixed.”

  “Ain’t no hoping about it—it’s get it mended or go hungry. See you round.”

  “See you, Jim.”

  Hank slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and shut the door. He stood on the street as Jim made a circuit of the cul-de-sac. Hank raised his hand and Jim tooted his horn in return.

  Hank wrinkled his nose at the concrete driveway. Wh
en he and Denise had moved in eighteen months earlier their grand plans had included flower beds, rockeries and perhaps even a small goldfish pond. But the driveway’s straight edges remained the only manicured part of the front yard. The ‘lawn’ amounted to patches of dirt and some stringy grass that hung its gnarled fingers over the gutter. Denise found time to harp at him about not tending the yard, but never to pull on a pair of gardening gloves herself.

  It’s hardly all her fault, Hank mused as he stepped onto the narrow porch. He had envisioned sweating over his typewriter during the week, then retiring to his beautiful wife and pottering around the garden on the weekend—ideally with a beer in his hand. Somehow it hadn’t worked out that way. An hour’s overtime soon turned into two and then three, and before Hank knew it he had become a career addict.

  His father, who had retired in Florida to escape the Colorado winters (and crippling arthritis), would be appalled, he was sure. “Unless you’re the boss, work is just a pastime to make someone else’s life better than yours,” he remembered Henry Woods saying. Hank had been seventeen at the time and sizing up his future with a sophomoric zeal. “You’re better off putting your effort into your own family—that way you’ll have something to rest on and live for when you retire.”

  Of course, Henry Woods had been a miner his whole life and worked in Bald Eagle’s last operational shaft until it shut down in the ’50s. When you breathed in dust and dirt all day, when you spent most of your daylight hours in the dark, returning home to your wife was no doubt the highlight of your existence. Hank, however, had planned to find a wife (and did during his final year at college), then love his job during the day and come home to love his spouse at night.

  Things had not quite gone to plan. Home/work bigamy had proved difficult to manage.

  He sighed. Well, once he had made his name and could dictate his hours, things would smooth out. He could get up in the morning and write while his mind was freshest, then spend the hours either side of lunch making phone calls and arranging interviews. After that he could devote the afternoon to gardening and paying Denise the attention she deserved. She could even put her business diploma to some use in a part-time job instead of haunting the house all day. Then the prospect of children and a mortgage would not be so terrifying.