Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  “Well, that’s very sweet of you, Gary, but there’ll be a lot of pressure on us. What if it doesn’t work out? That would be a bummer.”

  “Please,” Gary said. “One more try.”

  His eyes took on a soulful look and in them Jenna saw the Gary she loved, the Gary that reminded her of her brother. What was the harm in letting him have one more go? Everyone had their off days. Perhaps they had both been in the wrong mood. Evidently it meant a lot to him. Men were sensitive about such things. And anyway, it could have its fringe benefits. If Milton found out about their farewell fling, it might shut his mouth and provoke him into even greater efforts between the sheets.

  “Okay then, Gary. When do you want to?”

  “Now,” he said.

  “What’s so urgent?”

  His eyes jittered upwards, like the wheels in a slot machine. She almost expected them to come up BAR-Orange-BAR. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “I’d like to make love to you now.”

  “Well, come on then,” she said, taking his hand. His palm was warm and dry, drier than she remembered. As they walked back to the house she said, “You can’t get upset if it doesn’t work, okay? Some people’s souls just aren’t meant to connect in that way. Love is cool, even if it’s not physical, you know? Do you promise you won’t get upset?”

  “Mmm,” he said, nodding his head loosely.

  Gary towed her through the house so quickly she had to trot to spare the petite bones in her wrist. She thought he would lead into her room, since that had been the venue for their previous attempt, but he switched left into his and closed the door hurriedly, as if he suspected someone was chasing them.

  Foreplay did not amount to so much as a kiss; he began to tear at her clothes as if they were gift wrap. Jenna stood there feeling silly and too aware of her nakedness as Gary dropped his striped hemp pants and stepped out of them. While his methods lacked finesse, she saw from the deformed shape of his underpants that they had solved the key problem from the first time. He wrenched down his briefs and the elastic snapped against his thighs. Jenna had never seen a penis so erect. It looked almost painful.

  “Make love to me,” he said, taking her by the arms and laying her down on the mattress.

  She let him do what he wanted to do. His eager jockeying lasted no more than a minute and when he came his face looked blank, devoid of the intensity she had expected given his urgent insistence. He rolled off, leaving behind a sticky and slightly sore vagina.

  Oh well, anything for a friend, Jenna thought. And anyway, if—when—Milton found out, he’d work his tongue so hard it bled.

  Wednesday, August 5, 1969

  Sitting behind the rickety trestle table with its splitting wood and scuffed, fading paint, Milton felt like some old biddy selling cakes at a fete. That he was in fact making an anti-war sign helped his mood not at all. The slogan, OUT OF VIETNAM!, had been Sharna’s idea, yet somehow he had wound up being the monkey creating the inane thing.

  “You don’t even like gardening,” Derek had said as he, Milton and Sharna stood in a small cluster on the porch. How Milton wanted to knock Derek’s shiny white teeth out of his mouth. One good, hard jab and Sharna would see who was the real man.

  “I like making signs to appease the establishment even less,” he had said.

  “Milton, we’ve already discussed this,” Sharna had interjected. “There’s no point cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  “I know we discussed it, and I didn’t like the outcome the first time.”

  “Don’t do anything then,” Derek said. “Just sit around and complain about everything. It’s a great help.”

  “Derek, don’t…”

  “No, I’m tired of playing his games, Sharna. I appreciate that everyone has a different point of view and a right to express it, but he’s undermining everyone just for the sake of being obstinate.”

  “Undermining?” Milton said. “That’s rich coming from you. You’ve undermined your own cause and you don’t even realize it.”

  Milton saw anger flash in Derek’s eyes like the blue flame of a welder’s torch and he seemed to double in size. “You know what, Milton—”

  “Derek, go and get started,” Sharna said. When Derek glanced at her uncertainly she added, “Go on, now.”

  Derek gave Milton one more fiery glare and then slouched off toward the field.

  “I don’t know what you see in that asshole,” Milton said.

  “He’s a good man and you know it,” Sharna said.

  “He was a good man. I don’t know what he is lately. He’s gone off the rails and he’s taking this whole commune with him.”

  “You need to show him some respect, Milton. You didn’t start this commune, he did. And it’s his property. If he wants to turn it into a three-ring circus and become a lion-tamer, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “I just feel like he’s stolen you away from the rest of us, you know? We were all brothers and sisters of love, one family, and he’s fracturing that.”

  Sharna shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever. You can’t let things like that bring you down. And if you’re seriously that unhappy, maybe Derek’s right—maybe you should leave. Go and find your own way, start your own group.”

  “I thought this was my group,” Milton said. He tried to look glum instead of pissed off, which was how he really felt.

  “Of course it is,” Sharna said. She came forward and hugged him. He returned the embrace letting his hands wander down to the small of her back. How he adored the feel of her. The pear-shaped slope of her waist alone had him fighting a hard-on. They had been together five times before greedy Derek snatched her away.

  Sharna withdrew before his hands could continue their descent. She smiled at him, a golden smile that only made him want to bash Derek Brolin’s face in all the more. “If you won’t make signs for the group, will you at least do them for me? If I could make peace with Daddy without deceiving him I would, but I can’t see any other way to do it. If he found out I was smoking grass he’d never speak to me again.”

  Milton turned his eyes up to the porch roof and huffed. “Fine.”

  “Thank you, Milton.”

  And with that she had skipped off to join the venerable Derek Brolin, founder of the Peace Out commune, under the pretense of looking after the vegetable patches. But from where Milton sat (with only the O and U of OUT filled in black), Sharna did not appear to be doing much gardening. She appeared to be standing around and giggling and making jokes with Derek-fucking-Brolin, erstwhile goddam founder of the son-of-a-bitching Peace Out commune.

  The flyscreen door slapped shut. Milton turned from the hated sign with its brain-dead slogan and saw Jenna coming towards him. He waited until she was beside him at the table and said, “Look at her strutting and swanning around out there like she’s queen bee. She’s just as bad as Derek. They think they’re the royal couple of the Peace Out commune and we’re their subjects.”

  Jenna’s hand slid across Milton’s shoulder and onto his chest like a tentacle. “Don’t worry, stud. I’ll take your mind off them.”

  Milton turned to his right and found himself faced with Jenna’s ample bosom. She wore a low-cut blouse that showed off everything she had to offer bar the darker rings of her nipples. He had never fancied Jenna as much as Sharna, but at least Jenna had never betrayed him or turned her back on the commune’s free-love principles. He didn’t much feel like sex at that moment, but it would beat filling in Sharna’s goddam sign.

  He stood up and wrapped his arm around Jenna’s waist, directing her towards the house. She had breasts to die for, no denying that, but he found her hips somewhat boyish—disproportionate to her upper half. Some men liked top-heavy women, but Milton preferred his curves evenly distributed.

  “I’m gonna give it to you so hard,” he said.

  “Mmm,” Jenna said.

  Her indifference surprised him. As he opened the door for her he observed the expression on her f
ace. She appeared to be high, or perhaps on downers.

  “Did you keep a secret stash of drugs, too?” he whispered. Maybe he had an ally in Jenna, another member not prepared to put up with Derek’s wishy-washy crap.

  But Jenna looked at him with hooded eyes, as if she did not understand the question. “Make love to me, stud,” she said.

  She knew ‘stud’ gave him an almost instant boner. Clearly she wanted to get it on in a big way. They went into his bedroom and started a frenzied grabbing at one another’s clothes.

  He would ask her again about the drugs when they were done. Plenty of time for politics later.

  “Well I’ll be goddamned,” Deputy Sheriff Cody Benson said. “Is that what getting old does to you?”

  Martha stood beside him in the doorway. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  Bert stirred at the sound of their voices and looked at them with gummy, uncomprehending eyes. Then he sat up in his chair and wiped his mouth, out of which he had thankfully only just begun to drool. “Sorry,” he croaked. He cleared his throat. “Sorry, I haven’t been sleeping much the past couple of days. It’s been a slow morning and the sun was shining on my back. I must have dozed off.”

  “I’ll have to remember that one,” Cody said.

  Bert smiled. “Just like I’ll have to remember to come over there and put my boot in your wise ass. Sorry, Martha.”

  “You got something keeping you up nights, Sheriff?” she asked. “Maybe you want to lay off the coffee for a while.”

  “Coffee’s about the only thing keeping me sane right now.” He picked up the mug on his desk and looked at the moist brown sludge at the bottom. “Look, I’ll tell you this because you two are the closest thing to family I have left…and because I need to tell someone or go nuts with it. But it doesn’t leave this room. Comprendé?”

  They both nodded. “Sure thing, Sheriff,” Cody said.

  “You know that protest I broke up out at the reactor on Sunday?”

  “How could I forget?” Martha said. “Marcus Barkley carried on like he had half the Red Army storming the place.”

  “I almost wish it had been. No, it was Derek Brolin and his band of hippies from up on Bald Eagle Hill.”

  “I knew he’d be trouble,” Cody said. “As soon as I saw that damned car with its crazy paint job, I thought—”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Cody.”

  “I know there’s a bunch of them living up there now. I see them in town from time to time.”

  “I heard he recruits them,” Martha said. “Red Jakes tells me there must be at least twelve or thirteen of them up there now.”

  “A dozen bad eggs,” Cody said. “Twelve times the trouble.”

  “Who’s telling this goddamned story?” Bert said.

  Cody and Martha glanced sheepishly at each other. “Sorry, Sheriff,” Cody said.

  “I can tell you this much—Red Jakes has his facts wrong, as he usually does. Most of the hippies at the reactor protest drove in from San Francisco. Only a core of eight or nine actually live up on the Hill. And one of them was Hank Woods, the reporter from the Truth.”

  “Hank’s turned hippie?” Martha said, her voice rising.

  “Only temporarily. He’s got some fool idea of writing an article about it.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  Bert crossed his arms and sighed. “Turned out I knew someone else taking part in the protest, too. Her name’s Sharna Grayson.”

  For a second Martha and Cody’s faces went slack, almost deadpan. Then Cody grinned, showing a dozen of his paper-white teeth. “Yeah, good one, Sheriff.”

  “No, Cody, it’s not a good one. It’s the honest to God truth.”

  Cody’s lips extinguished his pearly smile. He snapped his head around to look at Martha, as if to check that she’d heard the same thing, but her eyes were trained on Bert.

  “She’s in Boulder, isn’t she?” Martha said. “When did…?”

  “Nope, never was. Lied right to my face and then went to shack up with that lot on the Hill.”

  “So what are we waiting for, Sheriff?” Cody said. “Let’s go up there and—”

  “The girl’s twenty-one years old, Cody, and God knows, she’s always been wilful just like her mother was. I tried to get her to come back home with me when I saw her at the reactor the other day, but she wouldn’t. If I go up there now and try to frogmarch her, I’ll have her home for about two hours and get the silent treatment that whole time. The moment I turn my back she’ll be off, and then I might as well move to China for all the hope I’d have of ever seeing her again.”

  Cody clucked his tongue. “That’s a pickle, Sheriff.”

  “Have you tried talking to her about it?” Martha ventured.

  “I tried to talk to her about it on Sunday. She—”

  “I mean going up there and talking about it when you’re both calm and rational.”

  Bert opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then chuckled at himself and shook his head. “It’d be like a Russian spy walking into the Pentagon and asking to make peace. Even if he meant it, no one would take him seriously.”

  “If everyone thought that way, there’d never be any peace.”

  Out in the main office the phone rang. Martha went off to answer it.

  Bert gave Cody a rueful smile. “I guess I’m stuck in my own little Vietnam here, aren’t I? Can’t seem to win, but can’t just retreat, either.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Sheriff. Maybe I’m telling my grampy how to suck eggs here, but I’ve noticed things have a habit of working themselves out eventually.”

  Bert threw an eraser at his deputy. “I ain’t your goddamned grampy.”

  “Sheriff,” Martha called out. “Phone call for you. You’ll never guess who it is.”

  Suddenly Bert’s stomach writhed. “Jesus, is she okay? What did she—”

  “She sounds perfectly happy. For heaven’s sake, Bert Grayson, just pick up the telephone and speak to your daughter.”

  “Shut the door on your way out.”

  “Oh, right,” Cody said.

  Bert picked up the phone and pressed the flashing yellow button on its base. “Hello, Sharna,” he said, trying to keep his tone even.

  “Hi, Daddy!” Sharna said. She did sound perfectly happy.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Listen…I just wanted to say sorry again that I lied to you. It wasn’t very…adult of me. I only did it to avoid conflict but that’s no excuse.”

  Bert pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, I understand why you lied and I appreciate you calling like this, I really do. But—”

  “I didn’t only call to apologize. I’m going one step further, Daddy. I want to put your mind at ease.”

  “You’re coming home?” He said it jovially, as if it was banter, but part of him prayed she would confirm it.

  “No, the next best thing. I want you to come up here to the commune and see that you have nothing to worry about.”

  Bert could only breathe into the phone.

  Sharna giggled. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes, love, I’m here,” Bert said, rediscovering his voice. “You and…and Derek…actually want to invite the law into your house?”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Well, you should know that no matter what happens and what the situation, I’m still the sheriff of Bald Eagle County, Sharna. If I see something that transgresses the law, there’s only so far I can exercise discretion…”

  “Oh, Daddy, stop talking like a cop. We want you to come up here—prove to you that you have nothing to worry about. It’s a normal place filled with lovely people.”

  Bert scratched his cheek. “I don’t get it. If what goes on at this commune is so harmless, why wouldn’t Hank Woods answer any of my questions the other day? And why did you lie to me?”

  “You know what journalists are like. They defend their information and t
heir sources to the death, even if they’re not worth anything. And like I said before, I lied to you because I knew you’d have a conniption fit if I told you where I was really going. Now, no more questions. We want you to come up for lunch on Friday, say about one o’clock. Can you make it then?”

  “Well, I guess so,” Bert said. Short of an ill-timed triple murder popping up, he planned to be there. In its entire history, Bald Eagle had tallied three killings—and one of those had been manslaughter.

  “That’s terrific. One o’clock on Friday, Daddy, don’t forget. We’ll seat you at the head of the table.”

  “You have a table? Aren’t tables against hippie policy or something?”

  Sharna laughed. “I’m going now. See you then.”

  “Bye, honey.”

  Bert hung up, sat back in his chair and laced his hands across his belly. The sun that had acted like a sedative before now warmed him and killed the final germs of worry that had infected his blood the past three days. Sometimes things did work out for the best, he supposed, even if you thought it impossible.

  Bert grinned. Cody’s little homily had been spot on.

  “God, now he’ll probably have one for every occasion,” Bert said to his empty office.

  Thursday, August 6, 1969

  Sharna sat alone on the swing-seat, wrapping black twine around a small bamboo hoop. Not long after she joined the commune, Derek had shown her how to make a dreamcatcher and she had taken to the craft immediately, her skill soon outstripping her teacher’s. She had the patience, precision and dexterity and she loved the way single arcs of string combined to make beautiful kaleidoscopic patterns. It made her feel close to nature, as if she were a spider spinning a colorful web. Best of all, she had parlayed her hobby into some income for the commune—Janet Underwood in The Log Shop bought them and on-sold them to tourists as ‘authentic Bald Eagle handicrafts’.

  Swearing and grunting emanated from the wooded side of the house, where Derek was trying to mend the water tank’s rotted leg. It was a bit like listening to a comical radio program—between hammerings, Derek called the tank all sorts of names and critiqued his own handyman abilities in the bluest language.