Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  Pennylane didn’t look as if she needed to know M.C. was sniffing after yet another woman from the old days.

  Of course there was a smell of insecticide, she thought; they spray the dope. It came from outside. Inside, weeds had found their way up through the floorboards. “Only that he’s still dealing, honey.”

  “Oh, sure,” Pennylane said with the most tired-sounding laugh she’d ever heard. “He’ll show you over the farm. He’s got weed and mushrooms all over the woods. The black choppers never pick up on them. We’ve got grow lights and drying rooms under here with huge fans. M.C. figured out how to rip off electricity from the electric company, you know. Not that the pigs would check out a vigilante’s cellar. He never sells locally.”

  Pennylane chatted away, definitely on some kind of upper. Chick sat at the other end of the picnic bench. The skylights were so high above them that they faded into gloom this far down. The place could be a cavern. This was too strange. She’d seen Sheriff Sweet keeping an eye on the Deadheads who drifted through town on their way to concerts and the hippies headed for barter days and bluegrass fairs. She’d seen front yards hung with tie-dyed clothing for sale. This living space looked as if M.C.’s family had packed up the sixties and moved it whole to Waterfall Falls, then co-opted a little eighties law and order and studded it with some nineties churchgoing for cover. Poor Pennylane.

  “That’s why M.C.’s so respectable,” Pennylane was saying, “to throw off suspicion. Especially since Bobby McGee, Marly’s oldest, started making the meth and freed up M.C. to go make nice in town so there’d be no suspicion about us. Him living up in the woods with two chicks and a passel of kids was sure to bring attention our way. He told them Marly was his sister and he was rescuing her from her husband’s beatings. I actually shipped my girls out so they could learn there were other ways to live. But Bobby McGee dropped out of school and learned chemistry. He even makes acid for the older crowd. He gets mucho cash for it. Here, I’ll give you a couple of hits.”

  Pennylane rose stiffly, slowly. There were red marks on her throat.

  Chick couldn’t hide her concern. “What happened to you?” she asked, putting the tips of her fingers to her own throat.

  Pennylane said, “M.C. and me had it out again last night. He won’t stop picking on baby Luke. He’s four now. M.C. treats him like he’s some kind of child devil. Somewhere he knows what I never told him about that baby’s daddy.” Pennylane’s eyes drifted off. “You probably heard his daddy play at the old-time music festival over in Birdseye. He’s there most years. That man picks a banjo like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Segovia.” She touched her neck, smiled her gap-toothed smile at Chick, and added in a boastful tone, “M.C. did this to me, but I blacked his eye.”

  Chick watched her pluck a huge multivitamin bottle from the table. “Hold out your hand.”

  “Thanks, but I swore off,” Chick said, fascinated and horrified.

  The bottle was full. Did the children help themselves too? M.C. was a total monster. He hit Pennylane and cheated on her and mistreated her kid; he left hallucinogens out where his own children could get them. If Pennylane had known enough to get her older children out, why didn’t she leave? Immediately, she thought the poor woman probably had nowhere to go. She was strung out on drugs and had probably never held a straight job in her life.

  “I’m hip, but stay for dinner. They ought to be back soon.” Again Pennylane’s gaze wandered off over some horizon Chick couldn’t see. “I used to love to cook tripping.” She looked as if she were contemplating slipping one of the tabs she’d offered under her tongue. “We grow our own food. I learned how to can. It’s a groove, this country life. And as close to peace as anything I’ll know on earth.” She put down the jar of acid. “I gave up everything but weed.”

  Chick felt guilty at her relief that she couldn’t confront M.C. here, in his make-believe world, with his agoraphobic wife, where he was cool, not criminal; Robin Hood, not a batterer; a father who couldn’t turn away his old love, and suspected he’d been wronged by the birth of his wife’s youngest son. This was The Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit universe come bizarrely alive.

  She’d slipped off her sandals, and now pulled them on with her toes under the table. She had to get out of there fast and tried to think of an excuse.

  “I don’t know, Chicago Chick. Sometimes I think I’ve come to the end of a long strange trip and it’s time to move on. Sometimes I think I’ll stay here till they carry me out. The trouble is, I don’t know where I’d go or what I’d do once I got there.”

  “Your birth family, honey? Friends back in the Bay Area?”

  Pennylane, obviously talking to herself, didn’t answer. Chick wondered if she’d been looking in the wrong place for the good in this whole M.C. deal. She ran a finger across the rough gray wood of the table. Who said the good had to come to her because M.C. made her suffer? Pennylane was getting the worst of it. Over the years Chick had watched dozens of married women enter a kind of Underground Railroad unwittingly run by lesbians they hardly knew but fled to on their way to new lives, straight or gay. She’d come to Mister Cuckoo’s land to help herself, but maybe she was really there to someday, somehow, help Pennylane. What an amazing trip, but not one she wanted to be on.

  “Honey, I’m sorry, but I have to split,” she said.

  “So soon?” Pennylane’s face lost its mellow, pleasant expression and turned worried. Chick felt pulled by guilt and by the need to escape. Did Pennylane think she’d brought a sack full of answers, and now was leaving with them?

  “Will you come back?”

  Instead of telling her that she wouldn’t, couldn’t be in M.C.’s space again, she found a piece of paper on the picnic table and wrote down the number at the store. “You call,” she told her and held out her arms. Pennylane clung rather than hugged her. Her own embrace was tentative, like she didn’t want to catch what this woman had. At the last, though, she gave Pennylane a good squeeze. “Know I’m there.”

  Pennylane pulled away, her tone alarmed. Had she heard M.C.’s car, or was she one of those people who couldn’t handle an offer of help? It was probably neither. She’d more likely sensed Chick’s ambivalence. “I’ve got to start dinner. Thanks for stopping by. Peace.”

  “Peace,” Chick responded. The word tasted of her past. It evoked the sourness of green dope, the scent of sandalwood incense. There was a pressure in her head. Could she get a contact high from memories?

  She hurried to the car, now anxious to escape before M.C. and his brood returned. Patsy flew from rut to rut, the string of multicolored worry beads on her mirror wildly dancing. She was on the blacktop and streaking toward town before she realized Pennylane hadn’t asked her a thing about herself or what she was doing on their land. Chick might have been dropping in at her pad in the Bay Area to buy a chunk of hash, catching up since their last visit. Instead of helping her resolve anything, M.C.’s strange time warp threatened to mess up her mind even further.

  It would do no good to confront M.C. or to expose him to his family. He was both their good king and their bad king and most significantly theirs, not vulnerable to an outsider’s judgment. For them it would be like trying to sue a physician who was still treating you. M.C. had the power, right down to meeting their chemical needs.

  She’d find another way to jumpstart a cure, one that didn’t involve interacting with people crazier than herself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Curious Katie—May 2001

  “Man, that Chick’s a lot of woman,” M.C. loudly confided to Katie, eyes following as Chick left with an emptied coffeepot.

  He had arrived two hours earlier, reeking of weed, and removed his denim jacket to reveal a black T-shirt adorned with a Day-Glo image of Jim Morrison. Oh, retch, Katie thought. M.C., legs stretched across the booth, was almost supine now. He’d been calling to Chick regularly for coffee refills, especially, as his high wore off, when she had a clump of customers or was in the middle o
f some messy chore.

  Pissed, Katie thought about punching the stop button on the Sony when what she really wanted was to punch out his lights. This was good stuff though. She had a feeling she might have more here than she’d anticipated. She was imagining the music she’d use on M.C.’s segments, maybe some old Led Zep. No, early Pink Floyd might display the interior of his mind better.

  She’d done hundreds of interviews before coming to Waterfall Falls, but they’d all been to a formula, done more to make a neat package for couch potatoes than to extract anything deep. Now, though, she felt like she was hitting her stride. Even Spruce had talked her head off while hammering tar paper and shingles to the roof of the lodge. Katie had filmed her from the top of a ten-foot ladder that leaned against the flimsy aluminum rain gutter. This dude talked too, but it was all bad news, some of the most paranoid, judgmental, twisted thinking she’d encountered in her career.

  “What’s your prob, M.C.?” She took off her sunglasses and used them like a sword, feinting toward the man. “You came on like the gentle new-age man when we first talked. Am I getting Mr. Cro-Magnon on tape here or what?”

  M.C. yawned widely and balanced a dental plate on his tongue, revealing threads of saliva. He snapped the plate back into place and asked, “Gross you out? I do that to my littlest girl sometimes. Scares the crap out of her.”

  Katie panned the store to chill, but couldn’t obscure the memory of those dark nights. What was it about Waterfall Falls that took her so far back?

  Her mom had dated a man for a while when Katie was seven. When Mom decided he was bad news, he hadn’t agreed to meekly disappear. Had it been days or weeks that Mom woke her every night? They sat in the frigging dark and listened to him rattle the knob of the trailer’s flimsy front door, bellowing threats and endearments and pleas until the neighbors called the police. She’d counted each blow of his fist on the door. She’d counted to thirty-seven one night. Eventually, Mom had gotten a restraining order, but she remembered standing night after night in her flimsy shortie pjs, hiding out of sight in the narrow hallway to her mom’s bedroom, and trying to stop her mother, who sat on the floor, from shaking so badly. Mom’s head was the height of Katie’s chest, and she held it tight, her only comfort that she could comfort her mother. It was too frightening to see her mom shaking and helpless; she needed to make her strong enough to be Mom again, but it hadn’t worked. From that day on, and maybe long before that (how could a little kid know) her mom had leaned on her.

  Well, it had grown her up fast, and added some emotional muscle and sinew to her she might not otherwise have had.

  She set the Sony down on the table and looked M.C. in the eye. “You’ve been so rude to Chick all morning. What’s your problem?” She hated herself for it, but knew even as she tried to protect Chick, she was digging for more of a story. Expose the conflict, she’d been taught in a journalism course. What makes the subject tick, what makes him vulnerable, what’s going to get the reader hooked? It was all about selling stories. Strip the subject naked and film him freezing to death, counseled one instructor. That’s the real story.

  Or was Chick the real story here? She’d never seen her so jangled and huffy. Chick was infamous for taking care of absolutely everyone around her, from old men smelling of cow manure to clueless baby dykes to gaggles of mothers with strollers and pooked-out bellies. She’d never seen Chick rattled before. It was a little scary around the edges to see her lose it.

  M.C. was answering her, but he sounded like he was speaking from inside a fish tank, his mouth pouted like a fish’s, the words rolling out slowly. Definitely Pink Floyd. She didn’t want to feel afraid. She’d rather not feel at all than feel scared like this. When the crash came, she picked up her Sony without thinking and turned with it at her eye. A sense of invulnerability and invincibility, of being at one with this recording device came over her. It was the one time in her life, other than making love, that she had a sense of serenity. I’m in slo mo! She loved when she was nada but an extension of the camera. She counted to sixty, then to sixty again as she filmed.

  Chick had dropped a glass coffeepot, smashing it. She grasped the plastic handle, a sharp edge of glass attached to it. “Get out!” she shouted. The customers at the counter stepped back from her. “Get out!” she yelled again, eyes fastened on M.C.

  Katie wanted to go to Chick, to ask what was wrong, to sit her down and hold her until she calmed down. As she came toward them, Katie was aware of the great fear rising again within herself. She slowly followed Chick’s progress with the Sony, panning the overhanging quilts for contrast, while she held her breath and struggled to kill the fear. Fifty-three, she heard herself counting, fifty-four, fifty-five seconds of tape. Chick was rushing M.C., but it was taking her forever to reach him. Chick’s long jumper hugged the front of her legs as if pressed there by howling winds. Her cushiony face, a smile its normal resting position, looked stripped almost to the bone, and not red with anger, but pale with rage.

  Again the Sony shifted as if on its own, back to the cluster of customers, shock and concern on their faces, holding very still as if they also feared to breathe. Where was Donny?

  Fina, who had the clothing shop up the hill, shouted, “Madre de Dios, Chick, no!” Katie followed her with a steady lens as Fina rushed Chick and held her arm.

  “Get out of here, M.C.,” growled Chick. “I’m not taking your crap one more minute.”

  “Aw, Chick. I was goofing on you. You used to laugh at shit like that. Remember how it used to be—tripping all night down at the Marina, the old mob at Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concerts. We were so happening. I dealt you breaks, gave you Sunshine. Remember that trip down at the beach? I told you what I wanted, had you pressed up close. Your knee about killed me. How could you do that to me in front of them all?” His voice was now angry instead of cajoling. “You walked out into the water like I was such a gross-out, you were never coming back. And you laughed at me with every step you took into that water; all the way out you were laughing at me. It took three of the other chicks to turn you around. Things were never the same after that. You took away my fucking manhood in their eyes, bitch, kicking me like you did. The other freaks were never tight with me again. They bought my dope, but they acted like I wasn’t cool enough to be around. Me and my old lady blew town after that. Traveled a couple of years, bought my spread here. Nobody ever even looked us up.”

  Katie’s arms were tired, and she rested the Sony on a shelf, still filming. Her whole being trembled with excitement, like a gong vibrating under its hammer. She’d never felt like this on a story before. So this sleaze came from Chick’s past. Did she have a right to record this? She’d film now, think out the ethics later. This was too perfect—the micro town, the old hippies, the vigilantes, the merchants and the retirees in the background, and all the facets of the dyke-straight clash being enacted in front of her Sony. Her fear had been replaced by the concentration she needed to get this story. The Melissa Etheridge song “My Beloved,” Katie’s personal anthem, was loud in her head. Etheridge had a way of singing about love and politics that had turned Katie on to the connection between the two. Through Etheridge’s music she’d come to see ways to make statements with her own work.

  “You’re one sick flashback,” Chick was saying, but real low. Stealthily, Katie checked the sound level. “I know about your ‘wives.’ I know about your dope factory up in the hills and your Mr. Vigilante act in town. I don’t know why you’re still obsessed by me, but,” Chick waved the sharp glass at him, “you’re going to get over it starting now. Get out. Don’t come back.”

  Katie watched through her camera, every bit of her focused on the scene. Fina grabbed Chick’s arm, her other hand prying the coffeepot away. “Come over here, Chick. I’ll find Donny.”

  “No!” Chick cried.

  “Okay,” Fina said, voice still calm, “Then I’ll call Sheriff Sweet for you.”

  M.C. had scuttled backwards on his cha
ir toward the window with an abruptness that acknowledged Chick’s fury. Now he feigned calm, stretching as he slowly got his feet on the ground. “Chick is a good person,” he told Fina, as if to apologize for her. He smirked. “We rub each other the wrong way. I get the funny feeling it’s time for me to split.”

  “Let him pass, Chick,” Fina instructed, pulling at Chick’s arm. She took the broken pot and held it behind her. Hector White grabbed it. “Get him out of here,” Fina told Hector.

  “No sheriff, no Donny,” Chick hissed.

  M.C. whirled to the camera and growled. “I could give a crap about owls or loggers, but I have a message for Uncle Sam. Stay off my land. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of my happiness—women, highs, and carrying a gun—I want that guaranteed.”

  Earlier the man had put on a bashful country-boy smile. He’d been playing to the camera the whole time, and Katie had hated giving him a stage.

  Chick lunged, dragging Fina with her.

  Katie heard a screech. She shoved boxes of granola bars off a shelf as she secured her Sony, then ran to encircle Chick’s waist from behind. M.C. slipped past them, white cowboy hat in hand, and sauntered out the door. She felt like hurting the arrogant shit herself.

  Chick was crying now, bent over, her back rising and falling with sobs. Fina put her arms around her. Katie brought a chair. She couldn’t stand to see Chick like this, felt completely hopeless that anything would ever be right again. The man must have been tormenting her a long time for this to build up. Had Chick told anyone? Why hadn’t Donny intervened?

  Katie was shaking, damp with a chilly sweat. The room lurched like a ship over a storm wave, like a small trailer house being stormed, a man launching himself at it with his shoulder over and over until she thought it would tip. She felt her stomach roll and heave. She ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet until she was weak and her throat felt ragged. She flushed again and again as if the memories were swirling down with the water. God, she’d wanted to forget her mom’s ex-boyfriend, that enraged stupid bull charging them.