by T. C. Boyle
The creek was a river actually, slow and deep here, with water the color of steeped tea. The dog lifted his leg, sniffed. Sess took her in his arms and gave her a kiss full of passion and hunger, and then he let her go and started fitting the groceries into the two backpacks they’d brought along. The mosquitoes were overjoyed. “What are you up to, Sess?” she asked, standing over him. “You’re going to leave the car here, is that it?”
He didn’t answer. The tendons stood out in his neck as he stuffed cans, jars and plastic bags of pasta and marshmallows into the packs with an eye to balancing out the load.
“I don’t see that it matters, Sess,” she heard herself say, and she didn’t mean to nag—tried to catch herself, in fact, but couldn’t. “Because you were right out there on the main street of town this morning where everybody could see you, beeping the horn even, and if anybody wanted to know our fingerprints are all over the thing. Dog hair too.” She tried to inject something light into it, though she was fuming all over again: “What would Perry Mason make of that?”
He looked up from the squat of his knees, genuinely puzzled. “Who’s Perry Mason?” Then he rose to his feet, lifted both backpacks by their straps and set them to one side in the tall weed. “Pamela,” he said, “I need you to do me a favor here for just a minute, would you?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Just take hold of Lucius so he doesn’t get spooked, okay?”
“Spooked? What are you talking about?”
“Just do it, will you?”
And then the grand finale that made her heart dwindle down to nothing, because he was out of control, this husband of hers, out of his mind, and there was no going back from this, this was final and irrevocable and you might just as well hope for peace between the Brits and the Irish, the Israelis and the Palestinians. He slid back into the car, fired up the engine with a roar and left the driver’s side door swinging wide on its hinges. “You know, there’s probably not five hundred of these Shelby Mustangs in all of the United States of America,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine, and then he gunned it up over the dirt hump and on into the creek, jumping wide as the water took hold of it and the tail end bobbed up for just an instant and then settled back down again, the slow steady seep of the current washing it clean.
18
Ronnie was loving this, absolutely and truly loving it. He was on the road again, his wrist draped casually over the wheel of the Studebaker, Star and Marco wedged in beside him, the roof piled high with roped-down boxes and Lydia stretched out across the backseat in a see-through blouse. He was dogging the bus, Merry and Maya making faces out the back window and the goats bleating away at sixty miles an hour from their ramshackle pen atop the thing, and that was a trip too—the bus was such a top-heavy, loaded-down piece of swaying and reeling spring-sprung shit even the Joads would have run screaming from it. Washo Unified, yes indeed. It gave him pleasure just to look at it, because it was a kind of in-joke, and he was in on it. And behind him—all he had to do was glance in the rearview mirror for the comfort of it—was Harmony’s liver-spotted Bug, rattling along just beyond the nose of Lester’s Lincoln.
And that was a whole other trip: Lester and Franklin. They showed up at the last minute, shuffling around in the dirt, hands going in and out of their pockets and their eyes locking on every face as if they were equipped with built-in lasers, and announced they were coming along for the ride even if they didn’t think they’d make it all the way up to the frozen hinterlands, because it was a free country, wasn’t it? Pan didn’t really care one way or the other—they were all right, he’d hang with anybody, though he had his doubts about how much good they’d be trapping a lynx or shooting a moose or peeling logs for a cabin. And Sky Dog. He was in the backseat of the Lincoln amidst a heap of sleeping bags, cooking gear and a bleached-out tent that looked as if Eisenhower had used it in the Normandy Invasion, and his buddy Dale Murray was bringing up the rear on his bike. What was it Alfredo kept saying all week—the last thing we need is a freak parade? Well, here it was, and the sun was steady on the horizon, the gas tank topped up and the radio spewing rock and roll, and Pan, for his part, was proud and pleased to be part of it.
Not that it was all fun and games. Some real residual nastiness had come out when everybody was deciding whether they were going to sign up or drift on back to San Francisco or try to hook up with one of the other communes, and a whole raft of people just packed up and left. And then there was the question of space—who was going to ride where and when and with whom? For a few days there, brotherliness and sisterliness just broke down like an old junker with a thrown rod and refused to budge. It was a mess. Totally disorganized. Reba tried to crack the whip, and of course Alfredo had his nose in everything, and the Krishna cat (Tom Krishna, everybody was calling him now) came out of his Krishna funk long enough to show some real skill with a hammer and saw, and the chicks, all of them, kept putting things in boxes like a disaster-relief crew—but still, it looked as if Drop City was going nowhere right up until the minute the county dicks came up the drive in their county dick cars with the little gumball machines whirring on top and the bulldozers swung in off the highway.
At least they brought the bulldozers in the night before and left them out on the main road so everybody could get a good long look at them in case they needed their memories jogged—two Cats the size of houses, one on either side of the dirt drive. Mendocino Bill wanted to pour sand down the gas tanks, and to Pan’s mind that wasn’t a half-bad idea at all—he’d done plenty of that sort of thing out back of the development when he was a kid just for the pure uncomplicated destructive rush of it—but Norm said no, let them be. And that was no joy either, strung out across the hill in back holding hands and singing some lame Joan Baez song as the first of the Cats came clanking up the drive and took down the back house as if it were made of pasteboard and toothpicks, Jiminy shaking his fist and cursing, Star with tears burning down her cheeks and Norm all the while looking over his shoulder for the county sheriff with his arrest warrant. Dust rocketed up into the air. Walls fell. Harmony’s yurt went down without so much as a whimper, and all Ronnie could think of was those World War II documentaries his father was always so obsessed with, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of Stalingrad, one wall down and a whole cozy little tea parlor exposed. And then whump, whump, the bombs hit again and the dust just rose and rose.
“So where do you think Norm’s planning to stop tonight?” Star said over the decelerating thump of Canned Heat—a miracle of a little college station out of Portland, and Pan was the one with the nimble fingers to find it. “I mean, if he’s going to stop, and with him there’re no guarantees, right?”
“Right,” Marco said, “but the more miles we make, the better.”
“That’s the theory,” Ronnie said, and before the caravan left Drop City he’d hunted and gathered one hundred pharmaceutical-grade Dexedrine tablets from a cat he knew in the River Run bar in Guerneville and handed them out like candy—at cost—to anybody who was even thinking about getting behind the wheel.
Star’s legs were bare, and her feet—perched up on the dashboard like two fluttering white birds—were bare too. She was wearing a white midriff blouse and a pair of cutoffs and probably nothing else beyond her own natural essence, though she sometimes dabbed a little extract of vanilla behind each ear and in the crease between her breasts. Ronnie leaned into her and took a furtive sniff. She smelled of sweat, of the natural oils and artificial emollients she used on her hair, and there it was—just the faintest hint of vanilla, like the residue at the bottom of the glass after you’ve finished your shake and let it sit on the counter half an hour. She’d wanted to ride in the bus. But what had he done? He’d begged and pleaded and made her feed on her own guilt through all its thousands of layers and permutations because they’d come all the way across the country in this very same car, with this very same radio and her very same feet perched up on the very same dash, and didn’t that count for anything? A
ll right, she’d said finally, all right, sure, yeah, of course. Of course I’ll ride with you. But only if Marco comes too.
Now she said: “It takes all the fun out of it that way. I want to see the country—especially like when we get into Canada. I want to feel it between my toes and stretch out in the sun if only for like ten minutes, smell the air, you know, and I wonder if that’s too much to ask?”
No one said anything. The scenery streamed by in a wash of gray, green, brown.
“And all these creeks and rivers—it’s like they don’t even exist, as if I’m imagining them—like there, right there, see that?—and I just want to get out and swim, swim all the way to Alaska, like in that Burt Lancaster movie where he swims home from one pool to another. Don’t you want to do that? Don’t you want to get out and swim? Or just splash around even?”
“Burt Lancaster?” Ronnie said. “What planet are you coming from?”
Marco snaked his arm up over the back of the seat and put it around her and pulled her close, a little act of intimacy Pan didn’t pay even a lick of attention to. “Yeah, but don’t you want to get there? Don’t you want to see the place, all of those millions of acres for the taking, the lakes there, the rivers? See the cabin? Walk off the site where we’re going to build? Plus,” and he was smiling now, “I’ll bet that water’s just a wee bit chilly, wouldn’t you think?”
Lydia’s voice rose up out of the void of the backseat. “I’m hungry. And I have to pee.”
Ronnie glanced over his shoulder to where Lydia lay sprawled beneath her breasts, then exchanged a look with Star. “Lydia’s got a point,” he said.
From the backseat: “What point? That I have to pee?”
Lydia was sitting up now, and he studied her a moment in the rearview mirror before he responded. She was looking good—if the light hit her just right, she could look very good, sultry, like one of those big-shouldered women in the Italian movies, her black hair windswept, her makeup smeared, and that randy, let’s-lick-the-sauce-off-the-spoon-together look on her face.
“What I mean is, maybe it’s time to pull over for the night. We’ve got to find a place to crash, right? And cook something up?”
“I don’t know,” Star said, “yeah, sure, I could stop.”
So Ronnie calculated and took his chance and swung out into the fast lane till he came up abreast of the bus, the air roaring at the windows, insects giving themselves up to the superior force in a quickening series of thumps and splats—and why, he wondered, were they all uniformly yellow inside, was that their blood, was that it? And there was Norm, sitting up high in the driver’s seat with his arms wrapped round the wheel as if it were the head of some seabeast he was wrestling, a fixed, no-nonsense, I-am-driving-the-bus look in his Dexedrine-tranced eyes, and Ronnie was flapping his left arm up over the roof of the car and laying on the horn. Marco rolled down the window and shouted to Norm to pull over at the next stop because Lydia had to pee and everybody was tired and hungry and wrung-out from driving straight through the first night and day and on into the evening that was even now spreading its wings out over the hills ahead of them like a big celestial bat.
Norm jerked his head back and gave them a faraway look, as if they were just anybody burning down the highway in a rusted-out Studebaker with New York plates, but then the shining white-hot gleam of recognition came into his eyes and he started fumbling with the little window at his elbow, all the while cupping a hand to his ear and pantomiming his bewilderment. What could they possibly want? Had he dropped a wheel? Run down a passel of Vietnamese orphans? Did the road ahead end in the sheer drop-off of a Roadrunner cartoon?
And this was fun, this was hilarious—anything for a little diversion. Side by side, hurtling down the road, Marco shouting and laughing, and Star and Lydia getting into the act now too, people in the bus—Premstar, Reba—making faces and sticking out their tongues like six-year-olds, Casey Jones, you better watch your speed! But then, gradually, Ronnie became aware of another sound altogether—a horn, sharp and insistent—and people on the bus were pointing behind him, like look out, and he brought his eyes up to the rearview mirror. It was only a heartbeat between awareness and recognition, but his first thought had been the man, what else? But it wasn’t the man, it was three crewcut young Oregonian shit-flingers in a Ford pickup the color of arterial blood. They wouldn’t have liked hippies, anyway, and Ronnie had seen Easy Rider—three times now and counting—but that didn’t figure into the calculus of the moment. They were giving him the finger, riding his bumper, laying on the horn. Assholes. Redneck assholes. Red-faced redneck assholes.
Ronnie feathered the brakes, then feathered them again—and again, till the rednecks had to ride their own brakes and the bus slid ahead of them like a big yellow wall, Harmony’s Bug, Lester’s Lincoln and Dale Murray’s ratcheting bike pulled along in its wake like the twisted little things it had given birth to. When Dale Murray cleared the Studebaker, Ronnie was going about twenty-five and the middle finger of his right hand was fixed just over the reflection of his eyes in the rearview mirror. He expected the rednecks to pass on his right in a flurry of hoots and catcalls, but they just held there in the passing lane, right on his tail, and so he eased in behind Dale Murray and hit the accelerator.
But the occupants of the pickup surprised him. They swung in behind the Studebaker and put on a sudden burst of speed, looming up on his rear bumper as if they meant to hook on to it. “Son of a bitch,” Ronnie said, and it came out of him in a stunned and wounded gasp, as if he’d been punched in the stomach—he wasn’t even driving anymore, just floating. And now Lydia made herself known, kneeling on the backseat so they could get a good look at her and alternately flashing the peace sign and blowing them kisses. Which enraged them even more. Twice they tapped the bumper—at something like fifty or fifty-five miles an hour, and what were they, not simple rednecks but redneck frat boys, because there were all the frat boy decals, DELTA UPSILON, U. OF OREGON, GO DUCKS, plastered across the windshield as if they meant something. Ronnie braced himself for the next thump.
“Are they crazy or what?” Marco said. He leaned out the window and showed them his fist.
The wind was wild, everybody’s hair whipping, and it seemed to snatch the breath right out of Ronnie’s lungs. “Stop the car,” Marco shouted, whirling on him. “Just fucking pull over!”
Star said no. “Just forget it,” she said. “Ignore them.”
“Forget it?” Marco’s face was like a bad dream, and Ronnie saw that and registered it, because there was a violent divide here, and he wouldn’t want to find himself on the wrong side of it. Ever. “I’m going to fucking kill them, all three of them! You with me, Ronnie—Pan? You with me?”
Ronnie’s hands were frozen on the wheel, his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror. “Peace,” Star kept saying, “peace and love, remember?” Ronnie looked at the three faces ranged across the hood of the car behind him, looked at Lydia’s shoulders, the mad flying tangle of her hair, and his heart was looping back on itself. “I hear you, man,” he said.
But then the whole procession was slowing, chain reaction—bus, Bug, Lincoln, motorcycle, Studebaker, pickup—and Norm had the big amber blinker going on the bus and the yellow wall was sliding into a turn, a side road, and there was the sign that spelled relief in foot-high letters: PUBLIC CAMPGROUND, ALL CARS WELCOME, 2$ PER NITE. Now, surely now, Ronnie was thinking, the pickup would peel away from them and vanish on down the highway, but no, it came on still, the faces behind the windshield taut and pale and vengeful.
The pavement gave out beneath him, and the Studebaker was thumping into a big rutted dirt lot interspersed with trees, barbecue smoke snatching at the air, cars and Winnebagos pulled up around tents and picnic tables, kids chasing each other in a flash of motion while white-legged old stick-people sucked bourbon out of paper cups and dogs yapped in a territorial frenzy, and this was it, America the beautiful, home of the brave, all cars welcome. Lydia had to pee. She was hungry. They w
ere all hungry. But before Ronnie could twist the key off and set the brake, the three frat boys were at the driver’s side window, and a hand, a meaty red outraged hand, was snatching at his hair, even as he flung his head back and away and Star let out with a screech that just about stopped his heart.
“Fucking longhair!”
“Get out of the car, asshole!”
All in a flash, it came to him that his antagonists weren’t simply the frat boy rednecks he’d taken them to be, but frat boy redneck football players, or maybe weight lifters, all puffed up like toads in their Oregon Ducks T-shirts. One of them, the guy who’d been driving, was like a monument ripped from its pedestal with two livid eyes and a blond crewcut drilled into his skull. Son of a bitch. A bitter taste of impotence and rage clotted in Pan’s throat, because he’d been here before and he knew what was coming. He was afraid, and then he wasn’t, because all at once he was beyond fear, beyond anything, and he leaned back into the door and snatched at the handle at the very moment the meaty red hand converted itself into a fist that exploded in his left ear with a sound of wind rushing down a tunnel.