The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  Eugene watched all this for a while, sensing that he couldn’t help her right now—until finally, disregarding intuition and no longer able just to stand by helplessly, he went up to her and embraced her tenderly.

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” she said. “You’ve been wonderful—so...so understanding.” Now she was in tears. “But I can’t...” She sobbed silently, unable to continue.

  “Can’t what?” he asked finally, holding her with all the love and tenderness he could send out to her.

  “Just can’t,” she said. “Let me go, Eugene—I’m no good for myself, let alone you. Just let me go.” She gave him what had to be the most heartbroken look he’d ever seen on a woman’s face, then squeezed his hand and turned abruptly away. “Why don’t you go ahead and pack things up if you want to. Or leave it for me—you got stuck with that yesterday didn’t you.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “I won’t be gone long. It’s not you this time, or last time either for that matter. You’ve just got the wrong woman.” Delivering all this over her shoulder so he wouldn’t see her crying, she fled again up the mountain. He watched her perform this variation on a theme—Futility in D-Minor he said dryly to himself, though hurting for her, wanting to go after her but knowing he shouldn’t. He began to pace around their campsite, then finally made himself start the stove for coffee to give himself something to do.

  ...Eugene wasn’t the only one who had observed Catherine’s behavior. Pretty Boy’s hunch had paid off. “Well, well, well,” he mumbled half aloud to himself, for the moment taking satisfaction even in his aching and swollen jaw. The pain and discomfort he was feeling was nothing compared to what awaited them. He sprinted to where he’d parked his bike half a mile down the road. He could have the whole gang up here in less than an hour.

  * * *

  Catherine shivered inside her nylon windbreaker. If nothing else, a short hike would at least warm her up. For some reason when Eugene had started in about last night, the morning’s chill had seeped right through the sleeping bag over them, and she’d been cold ever since. Last night had been glorious—almost like flying. At one point a brilliant light had appeared and she’d had the illusion she was soaring right into the sun. It had taken a real effort to bring herself back down to earth.

  But what the hell was Eugene talking about? What did he mean he had “become” her? She’d thought she understood well enough, until that business about a huddled, frightened child—and her father. That’s when she’d begun to feel cold. She knew there was something to what he was saying, but it was all too weird—frighteningly so. Now she was feeling the relentless irony of having come so far with this man, only to be faced once again with the demons that hope always seemed to unleash from her past—the worst of them misbegotten images of herself. Hope was an illusion. Happiness was impossible for her. Why couldn’t she be satisfied with life as it really was—as Shasta itself was: beautiful, even thrilling at times—but cold, merciless and remote.

  It was in this frame of mind that she heard someone coming. The slow cadence of a drum and the chanting which it accompanied—unmistakably the same voice she and Eugene had heard earlier though the processional it was intoning now was quite different from the unrestrained improvisations of evening—broke through her gloom together. As the procession’s lone celebrant came into sight, she melted back into the trees, annoyed by the intrusion though curious as well.

  He came up a trail paralleling the one she had just left and passed without seeing her amidst the trees: a young man in his late 20’s, barefoot, robed and ornamenting time with a mushroom-shaped Indian drum—so absorbed in his music that concealing herself had probably been unnecessary. Thirty yards or so ahead of her he left the path and walked out into the middle of a sun-drenched alpine meadow, where he stopped playing, ceremoniously spread his robe and sat down facing the sun.

  She watched in fascination for a moment, then shook her head: another hippie follower of God-knew-what belief or cult, acting out his fantasy on the mountain. He seemed harmless enough anyway—and if his religion was responsible for the music he could make, then more power to him. If he wanted to live out here with nothing but the tattered robe on his back and his drum—for such was the impression she got from him—that was his business. But she couldn’t help feeling revulsion for such a lifestyle.

  Then as she turned to leave, a peculiar thing happened. Her turn became one of 360 degrees, so that she found herself walking toward the young man, rather than away from him as she’d intended. Even stranger, she didn’t resist or even question this odd occurrence so much as prepare herself to meet him. Would he be able to sense what she’d been thinking about him just a minute ago?

  He looked up; she couldn’t tell whether he was annoyed by her sudden entrance or just surprised. “I hope I’m not...intruding,” she stammered.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Sit down if you like. My name’s Rain.”

  “Oh?...Mine’s Catherine. Thanks, I will.” His smile was of the warmest friendliness without scrutiny; she felt at ease at once. Above a full beard his face was tanned and weathered, wrinkled from the elements rather than age. His hair was uncombed but not unkempt; he appeared impoverished, not unclean. Over his shoulder was a heavy cloth bag which he opened to reveal a couple of cans and plastic containers. He removed the plastic tops from the cans and took cigarette papers from one, marijuana from the other.

  “Smoke the sacrament?” he asked with a pleasant grin.

  “Okay—sure, I’ll take a couple of hits,” Catherine replied, feeling the least bit of hesitation which vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. “Thanks.”

  He started to roll a joint by sprinkling the grass onto a folded paper, making no effort to shield it from the wind. It didn’t work: the paper was empty immediately. Amused, he turned to Shasta’s face emblazoned in sunlight behind him. “That’s right, Mother—got to have your share.”

  He grinned at Catherine and proceeded to attempt another joint in the same fashion. For some reason although the wind hadn’t abated in the slightest, he had no trouble at all this time and they were soon passing the flavorful number back and forth between them. Catherine was subdued but not withdrawn. Noticing the faint tear streaks on her wan face, Rain said matter-of-factly, “You’ve been crying.”

  She smiled somewhat sheepishly and shrugged. He made a few light runs on the drum, which was now between his knees; his legs were crossed with his feet beneath him. Catherine remained silent, a look of pain or fatigue in her eyes. “Care to talk about it?” He had begun playing now, lightly and with exceptional skill—yet so casually she had his full attention.

  “...I had the strangest sensation a minute ago,” she replied. “I was standing over there when you came by, and I stepped back so you wouldn’t notice me. Then when I turned to leave...it was almost like some big finger came down and pressed right into the top of my head and just kept turning me around. And there I was, walking over to you.”

  Rain added a special flourish on the drum. “I know the feeling,” he chuckled.

  “...Strange.” She fell silent, listening in growing astonishment as Rain’s complex, constantly changing rhythms flowed and segued one into the next, in a progression so smooth and natural it took her a while to realize the artistry behind the music. It was as random and seamless as the wind. “That’s wonderful!” she finally cried, unable to contain herself any longer.

  He smiled and continued playing, with no apparent concentration whatsoever. “My morning meditation. A little late today, hung over—first time since I’ve been up here.”

  “How long is that?”

  “About a month....This is my eighth summer. I’m thinkin’ of staying through the winter this time.”

  “Are you by yourself?”

  “For now. Pretty soon the kids will start gettin’ here. I’m sorta their summer guru I guess you could say. I was into that whole spiritual groupie trip myself for a while. Decided it was time
to get out on my own. I came up here to be with Kali.” He indicated the peak behind him with his head. “When she comes down here and tells me she loves me, I won’t need t’ come back.” Catherine didn’t know quite how to take this remark.

  “A lot of the little girls wanta tell me they’re Radha-Rani and share my sleeping bag. They make me out to be Krishna or the reincarnation of some other Hindu god. But Kali demands complete celibacy. I have to tell ‘em, ‘No, you’re a 21st Century teenager in the unaltered states of America, honey—playin’ at something you don’t know the first thing about.’”

  They both smiled at this. Then Catherine remembered the camp she and Eugene had come across. “Is that your tent down by the stream?”

  “Sure is—and a sauna beside it. Up the mountain a little way I’ve got a cave with a big piece of plastic over the entrance to keep out the damp. That’s where I sleep when the nights get real cold. This is my meditation spot—where I converse with Kali. She talks back sometimes, but it’s taken me years t’ be able to hear her.” He continued to play, his body rocking to the increasingly faster tempo.

  “...What put those tear-tracks on your cheeks, sister? Don’t you know that’s what brought you over here: the chance to tell somebody that won’t judge you—that don’t care and won’t ever see you again?”

  His question and his interest not only didn’t surprise her, they seemed inevitable somehow. She had slipped into a deja-vu-like state in which she knew in advance what this man was going to say and how she would respond, or at least that’s how it seemed. “You say you keep coming up here summer after summer. How do you know...Kali will come down here and speak to you?”

  Her question prompted another special riff on the drum before he answered. “The secret’s in the waiting—learning the patience so it ain’t really waitin’ any longer. Then some day I’ll look up and she’ll be there. Where if I was to put my hopes in her comin’, that would stand in the way right there.”

  Catherine considered this for a moment, her thoughts from earlier this morning returning to her in a rush. “I’d think that would be so hard,” she said. “That kind of patience must be the hardest thing in the world.” Rain just kept swaying and playing, his eyes closed. “I don’t have any patience at all. I want everything right now.” He seemed to be nodding in agreement or understanding, she couldn’t tell. “I thought I had life all figured out—and it bored the hell out of me. Now all of a sudden I’ve seen what it could be. It’s so beautiful it scares me to death!”

  “That’s what fear is all right—a kind of death,” he said without even opening his eyes.

  “There’s so much to lose—that I didn’t even know was there. And now I can’t go back to where I was before; everything’s changed. I don’t know which way to go anymore.” Her tone of voice had turned desperate. Rain stopped his playing and reached out to touch her knee.

  “Catherine, they say there’s a point in our development where the only sin is a failure of nerve. That’s dangerous talk because if you’re not in that place, you could end up tryin’ to justify the kinda things we’re used to callin’ sins: like killing life, in the name of some belief or other. Still, you might keep that in mind. And another thing I’m sure of. You find something you’re afraid of, and, sister, that’s a doorway. Fear’s a door to walk through.”

  He looked into her eyes...and winked—then resumed his playing. And now, the sun full in his face, he broke into the chanting, singing celebration of life she and Eugene had heard the night before. Looking at him, she realized with what was close to awe the beauty a human being can possess. Because she knew the beauty she was seeing in his face now—stirred in her by his music, the marijuana, the morning sun spilling over them in a benediction—was in no way confined to him.

  It was a meeting of time and evolution and circumstance in her own heart and mind. She, too, closed her eyes and began to sway with the music, crying freely with joy and sorrow and triumph all intermingled—equally worth her tears and this feeling of...what? Acceptance? Right here, this—what was before her and that within—was all there was. And she could make of that anything she wanted. She could see it as a limitation perhaps—although she wasn’t perceiving it this way now—or she could see it as infinite possibility in which she played as significant a part as anything or anyone else in the world—or universe for that matter. She sighed. She sighed again...while wind, sun, and music swept over her and through her and the earth rose up beneath her, holding her securely against its bosom, offering her the cloudless sky.

  Gradually her face acquired an expression quite similar to Rain’s. She got up quietly after a while and, her voice pitched so as to intrude as little as possible on his “meditation”, said: “Goodbye, Rain....I hope you and Kali finally get it together.”

  He laughed. “Thank you, Catherine. Peace and light, sister.”

  Thank you! she said, mouthing the words silently.

  Chapter 39

  Wire Rims, whose nickname “Stein” did double duty for his intellectual pretensions (Ein) and his general appearance (Frank N.), was holding forth on Darwin’s “Origin of Species” to a bored and edgy audience of Chris, Helen and Jerry. They weren’t actually listening, but simply to tolerate his discourse qualified them as an audience as far as he was concerned. “‘Thus,’“ he read, “‘from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving—namely, the production of the higher animals—directly follows.’“

  He looked up from the battered book with a fierce glow in his eyes—the look of one whose inhumanity is the product of a perfervid mind: rationalization run amok, forever chasing its own tale. “Darwin wrote that more than a century ago: survival of the fittest, baby. Brute power ruled by brain power!” He said this with the fierce pride such a man can feel for an idea: a man to whom ideas rather than other men and women are friend and comfort.

  The sound of an approaching motorcycle made everyone turn to see who was missing.

  “I found ‘em! I found em!” Pretty Boy roared into camp a man possessed. “We can have ‘em cornered in half an hour!”

  * * *

  Catherine ran the last hundred yards into camp, just to keep up with her soaring spirits.

  “Well, you certainly look different!” Eugene exclaimed as she raced across the clearing toward him. She leaped into his arms and after a long passionate kiss, threw her head back so that the full weight of her hair stretched her neck taut.

  “Oh I feel fan-tas-tic!” she said, her voice pitched somewhere between a strangled sound and a growl of sexual abandon in this strained position.

  “What changed your mood so?”

  She pulled away from him, bursting with energy. “I’ll tell you later. Let’s fly somewhere!”

  * * *

  The Leader, far from being insulated from the malevolent force they were riding—a whirlwind for which their powerful motorcycles were puny, insignificant symbols—was bound more firmly in its grip than any of them. Electrocution consumes the body from within. He led because he burned with the most intense heat.

  He dug down now into his personal stash for this ride, dispensing all the speed and dust he had to his fallen angels. They were soon manifesting both on their gleaming machines, across a landscape whose natural features were about to include hallucinations along with hills and valleys and trees. The Fool augmented the uppers and PCP with some acid he’d been hoarding, passing counterfeit Windowpane around as casually at 80 miles an hour as if they were still sitting around the morning’s campfire. Minds were out-racing engines in no time.

  “It’s great, ain’t it?” he yelled over to Chris beside him on the back of Fu’s bike. “It’s all a game, findin’ new ways t’ break the rules! That’s why I dig street acid better’n the pure stuff. Hell, nothin’ in life’s pure! Little heroin, little strychnine...makes it more real!”

  “Sure! Oyster’s gotta have sand to make its pearl don’t it?” Chris screamed back at
him. “Wound’s gotta have its salt!” They both burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Baby, there ain’t nobody here but me an’ you—and damned if I don’t wonder about you!”

  The gang was fanned out across the highway like a deck of cards, jokers wild. Yielding to no one, they forced a pickup and a van full of kids on their way to school from the road before starting up the mountain. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured in either vehicle.

  Just minutes ahead of them, Catherine and Eugene were ecstatic. He didn’t question his good fortune; it had been too long in coming to be false. Catherine knew that many doubts and misgivings were yet to come, but in the depths of her heart she felt prepared for them.

  According to what Rain had said—reading her own mind, she felt sure: a part of it he’d illuminated for her in some way—the more fears she encountered along the way, the more doorways would open to her...any of which could lead to a whole new world awaiting her claim. And Eugene was to be her companion. She was as certain of this as she had been of anything in her life. Over the motorcycle’s engine, neither of them heard the rumble of the rock-slide that would alter their plans before they’d even been shared.

  Rounding a blind turn in the narrow mountain road at 50 miles an hour, they confronted a wall of boulders and fallen rocks blocking their way. Only Eugene’s skill and reflexes, and a turn-out for sightseers on the cliff side of the road, kept them from careening off the side of the mountain or hurtling headlong into the rubble across the highway. He spun them completely around, killing the engine, before Catherine even saw the slide. But for the soundness of her own reflexes, she’d never have stayed on the bike.