Boonville
Page 7
1:12 p.m.
He had been gone less than two days and he couldn’t quite remember why he had left. The air-conditioned nightmare. His eyes blurred the parking lot of cars and high-riding trucks parked parallel to the store, three rows wide. Some were penned in and couldn’t leave until other drivers came out of the store and moved their vehicles first. The Datsun was one of the trapped cars.
“Kinda makes you wonder,” a voice said. “Maybe aliens really did kill Kennedy.”
John turned to see a man sitting on a picnic table in front of the market. His face was serious, almost grim, like he had lost something important but couldn’t remember what it was. The man spit a glob of tobacco.
“I’m sorry,” John apologized. “Did you say aliens assassinated Kennedy? John F. Kennedy?”
“Haven’t you seen the videotape?” the man asked.
John shook his head, half because he hadn’t seen the tape, half because he couldn’t believe he was entering this conversation.
“Where have you been?” the man said. “I saw that video six months ago. It wasn’t really the aliens, it was the show-fer. They slowed that Zapruder film down and you seen the driver plug the president like a fish in a barrel. Blowed his head clean off. That’s why Jackie O was crawlin’ out the back. She seen it was the driver. The same people coverin’ up the UFOs. They had the real E.T. and nobody knew it, except government agents, and when he died they destroyed the body. They got more, but their fingers don’t light up. It’s complicated and linked to drugs and patterns in cornfields and LBJ not runnin’ for a second term. And Incas. But it’s really this secret government run with aliens. That’s why I wonder if it wasn’t aliens killed Kennedy. It would explain the ‘magic bullet.’ You know aliens got ammunition like that.”
John tried to grasp the concept of a secret government of drug-selling aliens assassinating President Kennedy and denying President Johnson a second term in office.
“Kennedy sure is dead,” he offered.
“Yep,” the man said, spitting. “There’s a lot we don’t know about. Like Einstein said, ‘Anything’s possible.’”
“Was that Einstein?” John asked.
“I watch out for ’em,” the man answered. “Like you say, Kennedy sure is dead.”
“No doubt about that,” John replied, entering the market and leaving the man outside to worry about conspiracy-oriented extraterrestrials.
Scanning the shelves of the Anderson Valley Market, John noticed that whoever did the purchasing had gone heavy on beverages and sugar-coated cereals. A shopper told him if he wanted to buy more than Budweiser and Frosted Flakes, he should drive over the hill to Ukiah where they had several supermarkets, including an Albertson’s. John saw that the rear section, some one-third of the store, was dedicated to wine. He guided his cart back toward the front, searching hard for merchandise, having logged too much media time not to buy something. He could always be persuaded by packaging, cookies with a midget or an elf on the wrapper, a thirst quencher, a quick-and-easy, light-and-tasty, new-and-improved, thirty-percent-more, half-the-calories, cholesterol-free taste treat. John dutifully filled his cart.
At the checkout there was a wrinkled woman in a green smock manipulating an ancient cash register. Her hair had the pink glow of a home-brewed dye job. Her eyes peered through bifocals at John’s pile of groceries.
“Having a party?” she asked.
“No,” John answered, riding the consumer high. “It’s all for me.”
“Lotta food there,” the woman observed, bagging the supplies.
“I get hungry,” John replied. “Three times a day, at least.”
“You ain’t the Squirrel Lady’s grandson, are ya?” the woman squinted over the top of her glasses.
“Yes, I am,” John admitted.
“Ain’t that somethin’?” the woman said, like someone had told her that with a good pot of beans, you never added bacon. “Even the devil’s got relatives, I suppose.”
“That’s right,” John said, trying to be agreeable, but wondering what the people here had expected. He was Edna Gibson’s grandson, not Josef Mengele’s clone.
Before he could give the matter more thought, he was outside stuffing his groceries into the Datsun. He heard a car horn and an orange Pacer approached the market looking like something conceived by minds in Michigan overwhelmed by Japanese efficiency. In an effort to cover up their mistake, bumper stickers had been plastered on bumper stickers; “One nuclear bomb could ruin your whole day,” “Greenpeace,” “Skateboarding is not a crime,” “Mondale/Ferraro 84,” “Carter 76,” “Have a nice day,” “Honk if you’re Jesus!” The car gave the impression that if someone were to scrape off the bumper stickers, there would be nothing left but a giant fishbowl. It rolled to a stop in front of John. He heard a grunt of physical effort. The driver’s side door opened and the car’s frame lifted another foot from the ground. Out stepped Pensive Prairie Sunset.
John had seen fatter women before, lying on hotel beaches, cellulite craters digesting sand, naked or with a bathing suit in there somewhere. But they all seemed to have been old. Pensive Prairie Sunset was young. He guessed late thirties as she waddled from the car, flesh rolling against flesh, breasts hanging to her beltline, calves like loaves of head cheese. Her dress defied any specific pattern or culture. It was a freak-show tent, catastrophic paisleys and mongoloid camels drowning in a purple ocean. Was it Indian? Hawaiian? French? He stopped counting chins when he ran out of fingers. She held out her arms for a hug.
John felt his cappuccino rising.
“I’m Pensive Prairie Sunset,” she said, as if it were a reasonable enough excuse to embrace a stranger.
“I’m John Gibson,” he said, taking a step back.
“I figured,” she said, understanding, not forcing the hug. “Your energy resembles Edna’s, but not as released. You also have the same nose. You must be an Aries.”
“I guess it runs in the family,” John said, unsure which statement he was commenting on.
“Not always,” she said. “Spirits circulate, kundalini rises and flows depending on your ability to breathe.”
Kundalini? John thought. Kumbaya.
“Edna and I spent six years together at the Radical Petunia Arts Community,” Pensive continued. “You’ve heard of Margaret Washington, haven’t you? They made a fabulous movie of her book Cecilia. The Radical Petunia Arts Community is an extension of her creativity and her understanding of women’s needs.”
“That sounds great,” John lied. “I’d like to go to a meeting some time.”
“You can’t attend seminars, they’re for women only,” Pensive said, adding, “I do abstract pottery.”
“I’m sorry,” John said, wondering if the ceramics he had trashed had been her work. “I had a long flight and I didn’t sleep too well. I don’t want to be rude, but could you please give me the keys to my grandmother’s cabin?”
“Hey, I hear you,” Pensive said. “I know where you’re coming from. You don’t have to bombard me with half-truths. Be honest, it sets a good vibe. I know you were out last night and that’s O.K., men are like that. But could you get past your needs for a moment? I have an inflamed sixth disc and I have to get some bulgur and mung beans down at the Boontberry, and I did come here with Edna’s keys, so it would be nice if you could help me carry my groceries.”
John’s head was throbbing, his car was blocked, the caffeine was gone, and the appropriate response of “fuck you” hadn’t come fast enough. He found himself walking at Pensive’s side, passing the Lodge with his head down.
Luckily, the Boontberry Health Food Store wasn’t far. With the ringing of bells strapped to the door by strips of leather, they entered a shed loaded with wicker baskets containing a strange assortment of kiwis and gooseberries, string beans and red bananas, avocados and cucumbers. There was another room connected to the main store, housing an old-fashioned glass-doored refrigerator, which held cheese, yogurt, tofu, brown eggs, and ot
her perishables. A few hippies milled about barefoot. Pensive filled her hands with an array of edibles and ordered a burrito from the deli. The purchasing counter overflowed as she added to her booty, a mountain of health, on top of which she threw a loaf of Oat Bran Bruce Bread.
Stepping from the front door to the counter in two strides was a giant standing almost seven feet tall. He had a beard clumped into tufts by rubber bands and bushy eyebrows connected at an Arab’s nose. His eyes were as dark and watchful as a raven’s. John saw his hair had been braided into a ponytail that reached his butt, whose half-smile could be seen grinning from beneath the tie-dyed sarong slung over his shoulder. Holding a key tied to a plunger, he confronted an effeminate man who was minding the store.
“Here’s the key to the bathroom, Garrett,” the giant said, with a trace of an Eastern European accent. “Tell your gerbil-jamming friends the gel works for extraction and with each dozen, I’ll throw in a Grand Inquisitor.”
“Let’s talk about that later,” Garrett said, eyes darting to see who was listening.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” the giant replied. “This is business. I’d throw God off the Bay Bridge if he fucked with me on this one.”
“Let’s just talk later,” Garrett urged.
“Remember how good that crystal meth was?” the giant demanded. “This is better. This is flesh and blood, something that can sink its teeth into you.”
“I’ll come up and take a look,” Garrett promised, giving John an uncomfortable smile. “Now I have to help the customers.”
“I’m helping customers help themselves!” the giant yelled. “My system’s so clean if you rubbed watermelon on my head, I could taste it.”
John was afraid the giant might try to prove it. He looked to Pensive who was holding a family pack of whole wheat fig bars. She didn’t seem alarmed. The other hippies in the store didn’t seem worried about the behemoth either, continuing to finger jicama roots and carob clusters. John pretended to be interested in the wheat germ bin, casually moving to the other side of Pensive.
“I’m like this,” the giant said, jumping back from the counter, jerking his neck and writhing his body like a break-dancer. “I’ve been anointed as a seer. And you, Gay-rat, have a front row seat to the end of the world!”
The giant plunged his hand into Pensive’s loaf of Bruce Bread, popping the plastic bag and squeezing the ten grain into a ball of dough. He held it above his head, almost touching the ceiling. Crumbs cascaded to the floor. Garrett flinched, ready to be assaulted. But the giant dropped the bread harmlessly. He looked at it on the ground for a moment as if he were reading tea leaves, then leaped a step and a half across the store, out the door. A bleary-eyed hippie poked his head from the dairy room, but seeing nothing, continued to shop. The others noticed nothing.
“How are we today, Pensive?” Garrett said, stepping around the counter, picking up the mess and selecting another loaf of bread for Pensive’s pile.
“I’m fine,” she replied, John staying behind her, one eye on the door. “But it looks like Aslan’s self-medicating again. I hope it’s not a solstice-long experiment.”
“I try not to be judgmental,” Garrett said, returning to the register. He tabulated her foodstuffs, then asked, “Will that be all?”
Pensive said it was, producing a blank check from a pocket of her dress or maybe it came from a wrinkle in her flesh. John wasn’t sure which.
“That will be $64.58, Pensive,” Garrett said.
But there was nowhere for her to fill out the check. The counter was covered by her bags. Without hesitating, Pensive took a pen from a plastic cup near the register, leaned back like she was looking into a telescope set up too close to her face, and wrote out the check using her right breast as a desk. She handed the check to Garrett who was as unimpressed with her ingenuity as he had been with the giant’s outburst. Pensive scooped up the smallest sack, commanded John to take the others, and they were outside tramping back toward the Pacer. Not a giant in sight.
All right, John told himself, enough is enough. It’s time to go home and stay there for a while, regroup, detox, sleep. I’ll call Christina and make contact with Sarah sometime when I’m more myself.
But with a burst of doors, two men stumbled from the Lodge, one pursuing the other. At first, John thought one was the giant, but he could see they were regular-sized men, although one was much huskier than the other.
“Shit, I was just jokin’,” the smaller man said.
“Shut up!” the other told him.
“Sarah ain’t even your wife no more,” the smaller man argued.
Wham! Crack of knuckles, spray of blood.
“You broke my nose!” the smaller man cried. “My fuckin’ nose is broken!”
Wham! Head snapped back, animal grunt.
“My eye! Damn, Daryl, I can’t see out of my eye!”
“Get the hell outta here before there ain’t nothin’ left of you to see,” Daryl warned.
The smaller man ran to his truck. Pensive kept walking, uninterested. John had stopped in his tracks. Daryl looked around the parking lot, mad-dog crazy. His eyes met John’s.
“What are you lookin’ at, yuppie?”
John was unable to move or look away. A grocery bag fell from his hands, a container of hummus rolling to Daryl’s feet.
“Wait a minute!” Daryl’s voice slammed John’s head like a hand against a cigarette machine. “Don’t move!”
John was stiff from fright.
“I know who you are!”
Please God, John thought, let it be quick.
“You’re the Squirrel Boy!”
4
“Busted flat in Baton Rouge…” Music radiated from the main house of the Waterfall commune, bending sound waves, shaking tree branches, scaring animals, sparking acid flashbacks, stirring bad blood, and waking Sarah, who was sleeping in her cabin on the other side of the woods, a quarter of a mile away.
Sarah pulled a pillow over her head, temples drumming beneath the grog and stink of dope and Jack Daniels. She knew Mom was blaring this shit. Nobody else at the commune was into Janis Joplin, not anymore. Too negative. Without a telephone this was Mom’s way of reaching out and touching her, person-to-person.
No way, Sarah told herself, feeling half-alive and fully irritable, I’m not trudging up to the main house to listen to Mom in one of her dead feminist moods.
She flipped the pillow over, tugging it tightly to her ears and creating an air vent in the linen so she didn’t smother. It occurred to her that mother was smother minus the s.
“I swear to God,” she grumbled, as the music continued, “if I have to get up, everybody in the main house is going to die.”
The main house was the karmic center of the Waterfall commune, where residents connected with their comrades or just vegged out and shuffled the tarot. It was where the community stored its harvested dope and the Bang and Olufsen, a stereo so sound-sensitive and powerful that you could rock out to “Woodstock” and, adjusting treble and bass, isolate the voice of the one guy who booed Hendrix. The other houses, hoagies, lean-tos, yurts, and teepees on the commune weren’t wired for sound and didn’t have trash bags of Mendo Mellow in their closets, ready to shake and bake. Consequently, they were regarded as places of personal space. The main house was a place to “be.” Over the years, Sarah had observed that her comrades chose to “be” self-absorbed assholes. And Mom was obviously up there right now among the brethren, letting it all hang out.
Sarah had gone through enough of these scenarios to know the score. Mom was coming down from a binge of booze and pills, spiraling toward bottom, and she wanted Sarah to commiserate, reassure her that being a horrible mother and completely egocentric was O.K.; choosing this alternative lifestyle and including Sarah in it was the best reality any daughter could hope for. After all, life was unduly harsh and everybody knew Mom was trying her best. There was no reason to feel bad about anything. Sarah loved her, the past was the past, and tomo
rrow would work itself out. Every day was a rebirth. Mom needed validation. But there was certain music Sarah couldn’t listen to anymore, not without reliving the memories, reopening sores linked to a time she still didn’t understand. It was the music Mom always played too, Janis screaming, “Down on meeeeeee!”
Janis was a familiar reveille since before Sarah and her mother had moved to the Waterfall. Before they stopped believing in running water, flush toilets, voting, eating meat, table grapes, cooked food, and still went to church on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. Back when they were mainstream, living in a Victorian in San Francisco, and Sarah wore a plaid skirt to school each day. The last time she had felt like everybody else. Back when their karma was bad and she couldn’t have told you what EST stood for. Before Mom became liberated. Before Dad split.
Sarah was born before the first ripple of the “no-fault divorce” wave that swelled in California and rolled into every state but Utah, spraying alimony settlements and a mist of visitation rights, leaving behind a foam of single-parent homes and cesspools of Saturday mornings waiting for Dad. And when he didn’t come, Mom called that “irresponsible bastard” and told him, “Stop fucking that teenager and pick up your daughter!” Sarah was born June 11, 1964, the day Liz Taylor divorced Eddie Fisher and then ten days later married Richard Burton. For the first time.
Slamming the phone into its cradle after one of her verbal assaults on Dad, Mom would go for the records. No explanation, only records turned up two decibels past the point of distortion on the lo-fi; Janis Joplin, Carole King, Carly Simon, Aretha Franklin, Pheobe Snow, Maria Muldaur, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez. “The pseudo-feminists,” Dad called them. But at least the “pseudo-feminists” gave Sarah an idea how Mom was feeling, and, more importantly, how she was expected to react. “You’ve Got a Friend” meant give Mom a hug; “Think,” do a soul dance; “Mockingbird,” be funny, cheer Mom up; “Poetry Man,” be quiet, Mom was lamenting; “Midnight at the Oasis,” cry with her, Mom needed company. And “Down on Me” meant anything was possible, murder, suicide, spontaneous combustion. Sarah hated those “Down on Me Days,” feeling like she had to hold her breath and keep perfectly still or else the world was going to explode.