Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  It all hinged on getting this article published in Rolling Stone. A few eggs broken now would provide an omelet for his family down the line.

  Hank first heard the moaning as he opened the front door. He stopped in the entryway and cocked his head, wondering if he had imagined the sound. But then it came again, louder this time. He knew Denise’s voice from its underlying signature, yet there was something foreign about the tone and pitch—he had never heard these sounds before. Bad thoughts—robber? rapist?—almost made him drop his duffel bag, but then he lowered it gently and started along the hallway. He reached the bedroom door and then rounded it, not wishing to look in but driven by an irresistible morbid curiosity.

  The thing on his bed did not appear to be human. But his mind soon untangled the various body parts and identified them as a) his wife’s legs, bent and splayed as if she were in an obstetrician’s stirrups; b) a man’s hairless white butt staring at him like a single blind eye; and c) a pair of thin muscular legs stretched back from said buttocks.

  Denise’s head was tilted to one side of the pillow, as if she had expected someone to enter the room. Their eyes met, but she did not falter in her series of unfamiliar moans. She sounded like a scratched record caught on a single loop.

  “Good morning,” Hank said.

  The man—actually he looked more like a boy, probably some high school dropout she had picked up in the Eagle Eye Tavern—leaped into the air like a cat with a firecracker tied to its tail and fell off the bed.

  The kid scrambled to his feet, his still-erect penis wagging in front of him like a ridiculous fishing pole. He put out the palms of both hands.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he said, terror making his clean-cut face look even more boyish. “She told me she wasn’t married but with the photos and everything I kinda guessed there had to be someone else that lived here but I didn’t know and oh shit you’re not going to shoot me or anything, are you?”

  Hank ignored the gibbering little buck and switched his gaze back to his wife. She now sat up in bed, a sheet only maintaining her dignity from the navel down. He found himself entranced by the curved fruits of her breasts, breasts that until this morning no one had touched except him and a couple of her teenage boyfriends. When he looked up, her eyes said things he didn’t want to hear. The only real sounds came from Mr Gibbering Little Buck, who continued to respire at a rapid rate.

  Hank left the room. As he went, he heard the boy say something—it sounded like thanks for sparing his life but Hank wasn’t really listening. His perception had taken on a weird fishbowl quality; the walls seemed to warp outwards and glide by on oiled ball bearings. After traveling this way for a while he found himself in the study, which despite the pretentious name he had given it was little more than a jumped-up storage room. When they first moved in he had converted it, adding a couple of shelves and a small desk, in the center of which he plonked his old typewriter. To give his hands something to do now, he took a sheet of paper from the fresh ream piled on the desk and rolled it in.

  He stared at the expectant blank sheet for what might have been two minutes or two days, waiting for the crosshairs of his mind to find their target. The muffled conversation and footsteps at the other end of the house kept bumping off his aim. Just to be done with that maddening white space, he typed a working headline:

  HIPPIE STORY

  Rather than inspire him to compose, the title sat there, crude and stupid. He started going through the names of those living at Peace Out, thinking perhaps they might spark something, but they didn’t. No more than ten or fifteen minutes ago an angle and a good two or three thousand words had been mapped out in his head and now he had nothing. All of it wiped from his mind like chalk from a blackboard. Some distant part of him knew sudden memory loss could not be healthy, that his mind must be bending back and forth like a green stick, but he was not ready to acknowledge that.

  Hank drifted through another two or three minutes of contrived peace—as a house finds peace in the eye of a tornado—before his wife’s shadow fell across his desk.

  He did not want to look at her, but she almost seemed perched on his shoulder. His eyes abandoned the flaccid headline and flicked up at her. She now wore a light-green silk dressing gown tied so the lapels concealed each breast but left the remainder of her chest exposed. He had bought her that gown for their first anniversary. Had, in fact, driven all the way to Denver because he could find nothing in Bald Eagle’s one and only women’s fashion store. He couldn’t help wondering how much of Gibbering Little Buck’s scent was on the gown.

  “Now we’re even,” Denise said. She folded her arms and rested her weight on one leg, as if she couldn’t wait to hear his idiotic response.

  Hank blinked at her a couple of times, like a night creature exposed to light. He fingered his way through the thousands of mental files marked ‘GUILT’, but could not think of a single thing he had done to elicit this extreme retribution. “How are we even?”

  “You went off and spent time with all those hussies up on the Hill, so I had a little bit of fun here while you were away. So this makes us even.”

  Hank had been gifted (or rather cursed) with a black sense of humor and now he had to laugh. It started as a chuckle that tickled the inside of his ribs, but then as he viewed the situation with another person’s indifference, the chuckle grew into a giggle and finally a full-blooded laugh. The laughter went on and on until tears trickled down his cheeks and he thought his stomach might go into permanent spasm.

  Through bleary eyes he could see Denise glaring at him, incensed to know what could be so damned funny.

  When the laughter started to subside, Hank wiped his eyes and said, “I didn’t sleep with anybody on Bald Eagle Hill.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe that?” Denise said, clearly more comfortable now she could revert to her previous hauteur. “That you disappeared into the woods with a house full of drugs and easy women and you didn’t cheat on me? Why else would you put yourself in that position?”

  “I told you why. The magazines like Rolling Stone are going mad for what they call ‘gonzo journalism’. The idea is that—”

  “You’ve already told me all this.”

  Hank shrugged his shoulders. “So what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me the truth.”

  Hank felt an ugly leech of a smile creep onto his face. “The truth? Okay, here’s the truth. I told you I wanted to spend some time at the hippie commune up on Bald Eagle Hill so I could write a personal, intimate account of their lifestyle. You took this to mean I wanted to get stoned and hump every girl in the place while you stayed home and did the laundry, so you threw a tantrum and forbade me to go. I went anyway, and while I was gone you fumed and stewed and cooked up a nice little revenge plot, which I walked in on this morning. Is that about right?”

  For a moment Denise appeared nonplussed, but then she smiled and raised her eyebrows.

  Hank continued: “The only problem with your clever scheme is that I didn’t sleep with anyone, I didn’t kiss anyone, I didn’t take LSD; I didn’t even smoke a joint. I wore their clothes and attended their rallies and spoke to them and got to know the real people behind the hysterical public image. All with a view to being published in Rolling Stone and getting my foot in the door so I could make a better life for us.”

  Denise tutted and shook her head. “Did you come up with all of that on your way home?”

  Hank anticipated a perverted jiggle of laughter, but his emotions flat-lined. His eyes dropped to his wife’s pelvis, concealed behind its thin veil of green silk. Denise’s young steed had not been wearing a rubber, and Hank wondered what venereal diseases now might be proliferating where he had one day hoped his children would emerge.

  Something in his mind snapped like corroded elastic and he stood up, bumping the chair back with his legs. He picked up his typewriter and swung around, hoping but not caring that Denise might be in its arc, and marched out of the
study. His wife followed him to the car, where he put the typewriter on the back seat. She tailed him into the bedroom, where he took a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed. She spoke the entire time but her words seemed to run into each other, like clumsy drivers on a highway, and only snatches of them got through as Hank packed the suitcase with neat piles of clothes.

  “…always do your own thing…”

  “…what was I supposed to think?”

  “…read about those hippies in the newspapers…”

  “…I was angry…”

  Only when he sat in his car and started the engine did Hank’s focus return to the here and now. Denise drummed her hand on the roof. It sounded like metallic thunder.

  “Hank, where are you going? At least tell me where you’re going!”

  “I have no idea,” he said. It sounded like a lie, but as Hank turned right onto Main Street and accelerated, he discovered it was the truth.

  Sunday, August 3, 1969

  “It’s just not right, man. We started this place so we could get away from the squares’ conservatism and authoritarian bullshit. Free love, remember? You’re betraying that, Derek, you’re betraying everything this commune is about.”

  Five minutes earlier Derek had been enjoying the feel of the midday sun on his back as he and Guy hoed out a new vegetable garden. Now he was hot and sweaty and once again ruing the day he had accepted Milton into the commune.

  “Love is love, Milt,” he said, using the abbreviated name because Milton hated it. “You don’t know when it’s going to come at you, but you’re a fool if you don’t embrace it. And if you’re going to be a drag about it, try and bring us down, then you’re no better than the squares.”

  Derek bent over and started chopping away at the earth again, hoping Milton would get the hint. The soil around Peace Out was dense and stony, but with intense cultivation shallow-rooted vegetables would grow in it.

  “That’s not the point,” Milton said, and Derek didn’t have to look back to know he had pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “If you and Sharna think you’ve found true love and you want to go and get married, I don’t begrudge you that a bit. But that doesn’t fit with the commune’s beliefs or its culture. You should know that better than anyone.”

  Derek wiped sweat from his eyes and tried to retard a swell of anger. Most of the commune’s members came from middle or lower-class backgrounds and had joined Peace Out to escape some form of persecution, to live in an environment where they would not be judged. Milton, however, came from a well-to-do family with a heritage in producing fine lawyers. Milton himself had been completing a law degree when he dropped out of college to pursue the hippie lifestyle. On their first meet, Derek had mistaken Milton’s enthusiasm for dedication to the cause. Now he saw its true nature: Milton was rebelling against his parents and the tradition he felt had been thrust upon him. Hence, he pursued every facet of the Peace Out dogma with an evangelist’s zeal, apparently unaware he was behaving like a judge at a Salem witch hunt.

  Derek smacked his hoe into the turf and looked Milton dead in the eye. “What exactly is your problem with us, Milt?”

  “I told you, the Peace Out commune is about—”

  “Don’t give me that crap. Sharna and I have made a commitment, she’s stopped sleeping with you, and you’re pissed about it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Milton looked like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Just for a flash. Then he said, “I’m not the only one who feels this way, Derek. The others are upset about it too, but they don’t have the courage to speak up. Marriage and conventional relationships are misogynistic and degrading and—”

  “Don’t quote my own words to me, Milt.”

  “All I’m saying is you’re diluting your ideals.”

  “That’s right, my ideals. My commune, my property. If you don’t like the way things are going, you’re free to leave at any time.”

  “Wow, listen to you, Derek. Greed, materialism…you could be a trader on Wall Street.”

  This absurd accusation coupled with Milton’s neck-length hair (he had only been growing it six months) made Derek laugh out loud. “This is a lifestyle Milton, not the army. If it’ll make you feel better, go and etch some rules in a stone tablet. But I don’t think you’ll be very popular.”

  “There’s no need to be insulting,” Milton said, sounding like the whiny, picked-on schoolkid he undoubtedly had been. “I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”

  “Duly noted, Sergeant,” Derek said, capping off a mock salute.

  “Asshole,” Milton muttered, walking away.

  Guy had worked his way down the row and was now within a few feet of Derek.

  “Nothing like pleasant conversation to make a man feel at peace with the universe,” Derek said.

  Guy, a dark-haired kid of twenty years and few words, just raised his eyebrows in reply.

  As Derek chopped divots into the rugged ground, he considered Milton’s remarks in a more detached manner. Would Milton try and stage a coup? Derek chuckled at the idea. He levered out a rock the size of a lemon and knocked it aside.

  That night, all eight commune members were gathered in the downstairs living room. A broad coffee table stood as the social centerpiece and they radiated from it, four occupying two second-hand lounges and the rest squashed into mismatched beanbags. (The lounges and coffee table were Derek’s, transported from his apartment in San Francisco.) On one corner of the table a record player spun The Doors, Jim Morrison exhorting his listeners to break on through to the other side. Gary, a slim man with a rather unfashionable mustache, dragged on a joint and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. On one lounge Derek sat hunched over a bowl, using scissors to chop up marijuana leaves. On the other lounge Milton and Jenna made out with soft slurping and popping noises. From the corner of his eye Derek could see Milton’s pasty fingers teasing and stroking Jenna’s honey-blonde hair. Daisy and Del (short for Delilah), two raven-haired friends originally from Knoxville, had finished a joint apiece and now writhed and twisted to the music, occupying their own high-plane dance floor. Sharna lay back on the lounge and watched whatever played on the black screen of her eyelids, while Guy read The Lord of the Rings. He had spent his first two months at the commune almost perpetually stoned, but during a visit to Bald Eagle’s bookshop he had picked up Tolkien’s tome and now it had now taken over as his addiction. He got high in the morning and rambled through his chores, but by the evening he would be straight again and devouring his huge book.

  “I wish we had some mushrooms,” Gary remarked to the roof.

  “They won’t be ready for another couple of days,” Derek said. “You don’t want to eat one before it’s ready, believe me.”

  “I hate mushrooms,” Daisy said, stepping off her transcendental dance floor. “Someone gave me one once and I thought I had bugs crawlin’ up my arms the whole night. I ain’t ever been so terrified. I don’t know what people see in ’em.”

  “They take you to another place,” Gary said. “You see things on mushrooms that you won’t see on anything else—not LSD, not mescaline, nothing.”

  “Well, mushrooms showed me scary, creepy bugs and that I could do without thank you very much. Give me grass any day. So…dreamy.”

  The record player spun up a new Doors song, one much more melodic than ‘Break On Through’, and Daisy started to drift along to it.

  Milton’s hand (the one not holding his glasses) had found its way to Jenna’s breast. Before it could get too adventurous, she took hold of it and stood up. “Come on,” she said, guiding Milton towards a bedroom.

  Twisting up a joint, Derek watched them go. He couldn’t help but wonder how much sex Milton would have got in his natural habitat of stiffs and snobs and squares. Little wonder he clung so fiercely to Derek’s supposed ‘teachings’.

  Taking a lighter from the table, Derek ignited his joint and drew back on it until the reefer taste came through. Usually he only s
moked when he felt at ease, and he didn’t feel that way now, but he wanted to be on the same level as the rest of the commune before he spoke his mind.

  They all rode the high in silence a while, letting The Doors speak what needed to be spoken. When the album came to an end, Daisy and Del convened at the record collection and began flipping through it.

  “Listen, I have to ask,” Derek said to get everyone’s attention. All except Daisy and Del looked at him and he felt an unfamiliar pang of self-consciousness. “Milton is a bit pissy about the way things have developed between Sharna and me. He says the rest of you are annoyed too, and I need to know if it’s true.”

  Gary laughed, tilting his head up to the ceiling again. “Ah, little Milt. He tries so hard, doesn’t he?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me,” Sharna said.

  “No, well, he wouldn’t,” Derek said. “He doesn’t want to risk making you angry. What about you, Guy?”

  Guy had already returned to Middle-earth and he looked up again with impatience. “It’s your place, man. If I don’t like it I can get the hell out.”

  “That’s what I thought. Not that I would be that heavy-handed about it, but—”

  “Don’t get all worked up,” Gary said. “Milton just thinks he’s joined a fraternity instead of a commune.” He smiled and gestured towards Daisy and Del. “Anyway, even if Sharna’s off-limits, I’m sure the rest of us can find some way to amuse ourselves.”

  “That’s right,” Daisy agreed, although Derek didn’t think she had followed the train of conversation.

  “So you’d really say something if you were unhappy?”

  “Of course we would, man. Why else are we here, if it’s not to be as happy as we can possibly be?”