by T. C. Boyle
Ronnie let go of her hand and ducked into the shadows, and she heard him shifting things around in the dark, a rustle of twigs and then the sigh of plastic. “I got reds,” he said. “What do you want, two?”
She felt the touch of his hand, the faintest tactile apprehension of the two smooth weightless capsules. She chased them down with a gulp of sweet wine. In the distance, the glow of the fire painted the sky and she could hear the music starting up with a thump of tambourines and the rudimentary chord progressions of Sky Dog’s guitar, or maybe it was Dale Murray’s. They were dancing back there, dancing for joy, for wisdom, for peace. Star didn’t feel like dancing anymore. She didn’t feel like anything—she was numb, neutral, and all she wanted now was sleep. But then Ronnie ran a hand up her leg and rose from the shadows to press his mouth to hers, and she wanted to tell him no, wanted to tell him to go back to Lydia, wanted to tell him it was over between them except in the purest brotherly and sisterly sense and that being from home didn’t mean anything anymore—that was what she wanted to tell him. But she didn’t.
15
It never rained in June, not in California, because California had a monsoon climate and the climate dictated its own terms—rain in winter, drought in summer. That was the way it was. That was the way it had always been. “You can make book on it,” Norm would crow to the new arrivals from the east coast, “not a drop’s going to fall between April and November. You want to live outdoors? You want to throw away your clothes? You want to party like the Chumash? Go right ahead, be my guest, because this isn’t New Jersey or Buffalo or Pittsburgh, P.A.—this is California.” Marco had spent the driest summer and wettest winter of his life in San Francisco, trying to make a go of it in a big rambling old Victorian with a leaky roof and thirteen bickering communards, and he thought he’d got a grasp on the weather at least. Still, when he woke the morning after the solstice celebration, he woke to rain.
He hadn’t slept well. Or much. Star had drifted away from him when the bonfire was at its height, and she hadn’t come back. At the time, he’d hardly noticed. He’d had a couple of beers, and he was batting Alaska around like a shuttlecock with Norm and Alfredo, up over the net and back again, reach low for the implausible shot, leap high, whack! Everything was up in the air at that point, people gathering in stunned and angry groups (The Nazi sons of bitches, this is still America, isn’t it?), trying to feed on this new dream, this dream of starting over, of building something from the ground up like the pioneers they all secretly believed they were, and so what if they suffered? So what if it was cold? Did Roger Williams worry about physical comfort when he went off to found Rhode Island? Or Captain John Smith when he set sail for the swamps of Virginia? One by one they stripped off some garment or charm or totem and flung it into the fire, all the while pledging allegiance to the new ideal, to freedom absolute, to Alaska. It was an adolescent fantasy—the fantasy of owning your own island, your own country, making up the rules as you went along—but it was irresistible too. Marco could see it on every face, a look of transformation, of mutation, and he was caught up in it himself.
He was there, with Norm, sitting kneecap to kneecap over the embers of the fire, drinking Red Zinger tea out of a chipped ceramic mug and trying to read every nuance and foresee every impediment, when the sky began to lighten in the east. Everybody else had gone to bed, even Mendocino Bill, who’d spent the better part of a dimly lit hour rasping away over the need—no, the duty—to hire a lawyer and fight this thing, but Norm said he was done paying lawyers, done paying taxes, done with the straight world once and for all. “Look at that,” Norm said, waving his mug at the sky, “like God’s big rheostat, huh?” And then he was on his feet, brushing at the seat of his overalls. “Time to file it away for tonight. We’ve got six days maybe, if we’re lucky. Logistics, man, I’m talking logistics here. A lot to do.”
But now it was raining, a steady, gray, vertical assault of water in its natural state, unexpected, unheralded, wet. Marco woke to the sound and smell of it, and discovered that the roof was leaking. He’d never bothered to test it with a hose—it kept the dew off, and that was enough, and who would have thought it would be raining in June? He’d split the shakes himself, but he’d had no tar paper—or tar, for that matter—and the plywood he used had been left to the elements so long it was honeycombed with rot. Lying there in his sodden sleeping bag, he felt angry with himself at first, and then just foolish, until finally he realized how futile the whole business was: this was a treehouse, that was all, the sort of thing a twelve-year-old might have thrown together as a lark. He’d just been playing around here. He could do better. Of course he could.
He breathed in and out, watched his expelled breath hang in the air like its own little meteorological event, listened to the incessant drip of the rain.
At least Star was dry. He tried to picture her curled up on one of the couches in the big house, listening to records and gossiping with Merry and Lydia and whoever else had come in out of the wet, or maybe in the kitchen, whipping up a little dish of veggie rice or pasta for forty. She was a good cook, good with spices. She could do Indian, and he loved Indian. And she must have been in the big house, because she wasn’t here. Clearly. Nothing here but an abandoned longhair in a wet sleeping bag.
She’d complained of a headache the night before, and he assumed she’d gone back to the treehouse to crash, but when he climbed up the ladder in the stone soup of dawn, the sleeping bag was empty. And so he further assumed she’d spent the night in the big house, as she sometimes did, in the room Merry and Maya had partitioned with a pair of faded Navajo blankets strung across a length of clothesline. Marco had been in there once or twice—this was an open society, after all, and theoretically there was no private space—but it made him uncomfortable. The room smelled of women, tasted of them, of their perfumes and balms, their scented candles and incense and the things they wore close to their bodies, and it was orderly when the rest of the house was in disarray. And dark, dark and candlelit, even in the middle of the day, with sheets of cardboard and posters nailed up over the windows. Norm called it the seraglio. The big orange tom, no fool, liked to nest there among the bedclothes and have his ears rubbed.
Did he miss her after one night? Did he resent the fact that she hadn’t slept beside him? Was he worried? Jealous? Possessive? He didn’t know. But he peeled himself out of the clammy sleeping bag, stepped into his jeans and climbed barefoot down the ladder to cross the muddy yard to the big house and find out.
He went round back so as not to track mud through the house, and came up the rear steps thinking about boots—he was going to need a new pair, a pair of work boots from the Army and Navy store, if he expected to survive a winter up north—and he paused a moment to rinse his muddy feet in the fan of water shearing off the eaves. Inside, the teapot was going and the windows were steamed over. It wasn’t cold, not really, but he found he was shivering as he pushed open the door on a wall of cooked air and a complex admixture of scents: fresh-baked bread, coffee, basil, vegetable stock simmering in a bright scoured pot on the stove.
Star was there, leaning over the pot, her child’s hands cupped beneath a load of chopped celery. She gave him a smile, dropped the celery into the pot and crossed the room to hold him briefly and give him the briefest of kisses. “Where were you?” he breathed. “I missed you.” And she said, under her breath, “With the girls.”
Verbie was there too, with her sister, a long-faced girl with a bulge of jaw and eyes set too close together, and Merry, Maya and Lydia, all of them hovering around the stove with coffee mugs cradled in their hands. The two yellow dogs lay on the floor at their feet. “You eat yet?” Star wanted to know, and then she was back at the chopping board, scooping up vegetables for the pot.
“I feel like I’m in a Turkish bath or something,” he said, and found himself a seat at the table, smoothing his wet hair back with the palm of his right hand. He parted it in the middle, like everybody else, but the parti
ng always seemed ragged, as if his head wasn’t centered on his body, and unless he made a conscious effort with comb and brush there wasn’t much hope for it. “No,” he said, in answer to Star’s question, “not yet—but what time is it, anyway, you think?”
Merry answered for her. “I don’t know—two? Two-thirty?” She poured a cup of coffee, two teaspoons of sugar, a float of goat’s milk, and brought it to him. “What time did you turn in last night?”
He made a vague gesture. “Norm,” he began, “I was with Norm,” and they all—even Verbie’s long-faced sister—burst out laughing. He liked that. Liked looking at them, at their small even teeth, brilliant gums, eyes squeezed down to slits. The laughter trailed off into giggles. “Say no more,” Star said.
And then he was dipping warm bread into his coffee, wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment, not quite ready to start anything yet. The conversation flowed round him, soft voices, the rhythmic heel-and-toe dance of the knife on the chopping block.
“The goats are going, right?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. I guess.”
“Do they need like a special, what do you call it—a wagon? Like horses, I mean?”
“Oh, you mean a goat wagon.” More giggles. “We can just go out to the goat wagon store and get one.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay, so am I. What are we going to feed them?”
“The goats?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know—grass?”
“In the winter.”
“Hay?”
“Where’re we going to get hay in the middle of Alaska?”
“Buy it.”
“With what?”
“Barter for it, then. Like we do here. You know, dip candles, string beads, pottery, honey, that kind of thing.”
“Who’s going to want beads up there?”
“The Eskimos.”
“There aren’t any Eskimos where we’re going. It’s more like woods and rolling hills. Like Minnesota or something. That’s what Norm said, anyway.”
“So Indians. They’ve got Indians up there, haven’t they?”
“Indians make their own beads.”
“Teenagers, then. Teenagers dying to escape the grind. We’ll start a revolution. Flower power on the tundra!”
“Yeah, right.”
Star was the one concerned with the goats. They were her domain now—nobody else seemed to bother with them. She even smelled of goat, and he didn’t mind that, not at all, because it was a natural smell, and that was what they were getting here: nature. And if they could keep it together long enough to get to Alaska, they were going to get a whole lot more of it.
“I wouldn’t be worried about goats, I’d be worried about long underwear—I mean, what are we supposed to wear up there? Mink coats? Mukluks?” Pause. “What are mukluks, anyway?”
“We’ll just go to Goodwill or something. Get a bunch of sweaters and overcoats. And knit. We could knit, no problem—”
“Layers, that’s how you do it.”
“I hear if you get overheated the sweat like freezes on your body and you wind up like dying of hypothermia or something.”
“I don’t sweat.”
“You will, once we get you your mink panties and ermine bra.”
They were laughing. They were happy. They’d go to Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, Devil’s Island—it was all the same to them. It was an adventure, that was all. A lark. They were the women. They were the soul and foundation of the enterprise. And sitting there in the kitchen with the rain tapping at the windows and the stock simmering on the stove and the women’s voices casting a net in the air around him, Marco couldn’t help but feel that everything was going to work out after all.
It was late afternoon and raining still when the dogs lifted their heads from the floor and cocked their ears—a vehicle was coming up the drive, something big, preceded by a rumble of wheels or maybe treads and the stuttering alien wheeze of a diesel engine. Marco was still in the kitchen, sitting at the window with a book, feeling confined and constrained, but in no mood to go back and crouch over a wet sleeping bag in a leaky treehouse for the rest of the day. He was bored. Anxious to get started, to do something, see to details, arrange things, get this show on the road—Alaska, Alaska or Bust, and all he could see was a log cabin in a glade overlooking a broad flat river so full of salmon you could walk across their backs to the other side, and moose, moose standing in shallow pools with long strips of vegetation decorating their antlers. But it was raining, and he had a book, and he was going nowhere. As for the rest, the cast of characters had changed somewhat—Reba was at the stove now, making a casserole to go with the soup, and Alfredo was hunkered over a game of solitaire at the kitchen table while Che and Sunshine hurtled in and out of the room in a sustained frenzy that might have been called tag or hide-and-go-seek or gestalt therapy. Star and Merry were making piles of things in the corner—Six teapots, do we really need six teapots?—and Maya was sliding jars of preserves into a cardboard box with the grudging slow imponderability of a prisoner. The light was a gray slab. Things were slow.
But the dogs were on their feet now, clicking across the floor on stiff black nails. Freak began to bark suddenly, and then Frodo joined in, and everybody was thinking the same thing—the bulldozers. “Oh, shit,” Alfredo said, his head jerking up as if it were on a string. Reba gave him a stricken look. “It couldn’t be,” she said, “not yet. Norm said Friday, didn’t he?” Marco flung down the book without marking his place—Trout Fishing in America, one of the titles Star had mysteriously interred beneath the leaves yesterday, and he still couldn’t fathom what she’d been thinking—and then he was out the door, down the steps and into the battleground of the yard.
At first there was only the noise, a grinding mechanical assault tearing at his heart and his brain till he didn’t know whether to stand his ground or run—and what would he tell them, what would he do when they started battering it all to pieces? He clenched his toes in the mud, heard the others gathering on the porch. “They can’t just come in here like this”—Reba’s voice, wound tight, spinning out behind him—“can they?” There was a flash of yellow—bright as Heinz mustard—and the shape of something moving through the trees along the road, and it was no bulldozer, it was too big for that, too
yellow . . .
It was a bus. A school bus. And Norm, sleepless Norm, fueled on amphetamine and black coffee, was at the wheel, the suede cowboy hat pulled down to the level of the black broken frames of his glasses and Premstar perched in his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The gears ground with a shriek, the massive face of the thing swung into the yard and beat the mud into submission and the rain sculpted the two long streaming banks of windows in a smooth wrap. There was the wheeze of the air brakes, a heavy dependable sloshing, and then the bus was idling there before them, as if all they had to do was pick up their schoolbags and lunchboxes and climb aboard.
The door folded in on itself with a sigh, and Premstar, the former Miss Watsonville, with her high tight breasts and perfect legs, was stepping down from the platform, an uncertain smile puckering her lips. She was wearing white lipstick, blue eyeshadow and a pair of big blunt high-heeled boots that crept up over her knees. Marco watched, riveted, as she stepped daintily into the mud, brushed the hair out of her face, and glanced up at him. “We got a school bus,” she said in a breathy little puff of a voice, and she might have been describing a trip to the grocery for toilet paper, “—me and Norm.”
Norm pulled the hand brake and came down the steps behind her, the bus idling with a stuttering grab and release, the smell of diesel infesting the air. The rain spattered his hat and his fringed jacket, the drops dark as blood against the honey-colored suede. His eyes were tired. The rain made him wince. “Go ahead,” he said, waving an arm, “take a look. It’s a ninety-one-passenger 1963 Crown, is what it is, the kind of thing you could get if you were real lucky and real smart on a straight-up trade for a sli
ghtly dented, almost-like-new 1970 VW van, if you know what I mean.”
Alfredo was standing there in the rain now too, and Reba beside him; Star came up and slipped an arm round Marco’s waist. They were all grinning, even as Premstar ascended the back steps and Norm slouched on by them, his shoulders slumped and his head dropped down between them like a bowling ball. “But I don’t want to shut it off, that’s the thing,” he said, “because it was a real hassle getting it started—the cat that sold it to me said it was a little quirky, especially on cold mornings.”
“Cold mornings?” Alfredo said. “This is the afternoon, and if it’s anything less than maybe sixty-five out right now, then we need a new weatherman.”
“Yeah, well, this is a good machine, heavy duty, no more than like a hundred twenty thousand miles on it and it could go three times that, easy, so what I’m saying is I haven’t slept in two days and I’ve done my part, more than done my part, and I think somebody—like Bill, for instance—should be looking to the tune-up or whatever, and the rest of you people should be loading your shit aboard, because time and the river and the county board of supervisors wait for no man.” He mounted the back steps and put an arm round Premstar. “Or chick, for that matter. But I’ve had it, I’m wiped, and somebody’s going to have to build a rack or something all around the roof, for storage, and we’re going to need rope and bungee cords and like that. And food, I mean, bins of just the basic stuff, dried beans and flour and whatnot, from the coop down in Guerneville.”
He paused, patted down his overalls and dug a money clip from the inside pocket. “Here,” he said, peeling off a hundred-dollar bill and holding it out over the steps so that the rain darkened it till it was like a piece of wet cardboard, like play money, “you take it, Reba, okay? For food?” And then he pulled open the screen door and edged his way in, Premstar tucked neatly under one arm.