The Road Home

by Patrick E. Craig

  Jenny felt the cold creep into the car. Then somebody was with her in the car, and she felt as if she were being covered with warm feathers. She turned to look, and she wasn’t in the car anymore. She was lying on a bed in a small room. A woman was lying on the bed with her. Jenny tried to cuddle up to her and get warm, but the heat was gone from the woman’s body. The man who had drowned was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, weeping. Ashtrays full of half-smoked cigarettes and empty bottles were scattered around the room. On a stand by the bed was a spoon with some brown liquid and a piece of cotton in it. The woman had something tied around her arm. Jenny was crying. Suddenly the woman’s eyes opened, and she looked straight at Jenny.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean for all this to happen. I just wanted the pain to stop.”

  The woman looked up at the ceiling. “Dear Jesus,” she prayed, “please look after my little girl.”

  Then everything began to get all mixed up. She was back in the car, and then she was being carried through blinding snow. She was freezing, and then she was wrapped in something warm and soft. Now she was somewhere in a dark room. She was being held next to a warm, beating heart, and she felt moisture dropping on her face. She opened her eyes and looked up into the beautiful face of another woman. The woman was holding her close and weeping. Her body was shaking with sobs. It was Mama! And then as she looked, Jerusha’s face turned into the face of the woman in the small room. The other woman’s skin was cold and blue. Her eyes opened, and she looked at Jenny.

  “Jenny, come find me. I’m lost, so lost,” she said, and then the skin began to melt off her face, and she was just bones and the bones were death, and Jenny fell into the water, and the man who had drowned came up from below and grabbed her leg with bony fingers and began to pull her down, down, down…

  Jenny sat up in bed and screamed. “Mama, Mama, where are you? Come find me, Mama!”

  There was the sound of hurried footsteps in the hall, and Jerusha rushed into the room, holding a lamp. “Jenny, darling, what is it?” she asked as she came to the side of Jenny’s bed.

  “A dream, Mama, a horrible dream,” Jenny sobbed.

  Jerusha put the lamp on the stand by the bed and sat next to Jenny. She took the girl in her arms and kissed her forehead. “I’m here, my darling, I’m here.”

  Jerusha held Jenny close, and Jenny felt the beating of her mother’s heart.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Johnny

  JOHNNY THE CANDYMAN WOKE UP out of a deep sleep and sat straight up in his bed, moaning and holding his head in his hands. Strange images and faces and…horses, yes, horses and plows, like a weird kaleidoscopic farm movie, were all mixed together in his mind. Finally his dazed thoughts cleared, and he opened his eyes. As he slowly came back to reality, he shrugged and thought, The drugs. It was the drugs I took last night.

  Johnny rubbed his eyes and looked around the room. The walls were brightly painted with clashing primary colors that strobed and flashed and made his head ache. Large posters of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi were pinned on the wall over the bed. The room was decorated in the quasi-Edwardian mode that was all the rage in the Haight-Ashbury.

  An overstuffed brown, furry couch and a brass floor lamp with a shade fringed with strands of tiny golden beads sat against the wall. An expensive oriental rug lay on the floor. The stale smell of incense, Gauloise cigarettes, and patchouli oil permeated the room. On the back of the bedroom door was a hand-lettered poster advertising one of Ken Kesey’s acid trips. The letters seemed to swell and pulse—more of the lingering effects of the acid, he guessed.

  His precious Gibson twelve-string guitar leaned against the wall, its case lying open on the floor beside it with a few dollars from his most recent panhandling foray still inside. His fingers ached from the hours of mindless strumming that had passed for music among his friends the night before.

  The sound of automobile traffic rose up from the street outside. His bed was a mattress on the floor next to the wall, so he turned over on his knees, grabbed the windowsill, pulled himself up, and looked out through the tall window of his second-floor flat. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper headed west. It was time for Sunday morning football at Kezar Stadium, and a line of cars inched along as the straight folks drove down Haight Street to see the hippies. Unfortunately for the drive-bys, the hippies had been partying Saturday night, and very few of them were out on the street Sunday morning.

  Johnny crawled off his mattress and groped his way to the pile of clothes heaped on the floor. He pawed through until he found the pieces that comprised his favorite outfit. He took hold of the couch and pulled himself up slowly, his head aching. He stood there for a minute until the whirling sensation passed. Then he pulled his clothes on. A thin cotton embroidered shirt, torn bell-bottom jeans, and green suede Beatle boots completed his attire. He stumbled over to the closet, pulled his leather-fringed jacket off a hanger, and put it on. He went to the mirror and stared at his pale complexion for a few moments.

  Sheesh, look at me. I’ve got to get out more.

  Then he ran his fingers through his long dark hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and fastened it with a rubber band. He looked at the orange headband on the dresser with the button that read, “Give us this day our Daily Flash” pinned to the knot, but he decided to forego wearing it this morning. His body was still wrestling with the effects of the drugs, and he really didn’t feel like a “daily flash” at the moment. As he stared at the bleary-eyed face in the mirror, he wondered why he thought tripping on LSD was so great.

  He thought back to last night’s “freakout.” After the LSD had come on, Fat Freddy, one of his roommates, sat down in the corner and started asking, “But what does it all mean?” over and over until he had almost driven Johnny crazy. And then there was Lisa, the girl from Seattle, who liked to writhe like a snake on the floor when she got stoned. At one point Johnny got his guitar, and they sat in a circle and jammed until late into the night, everyone moaning and chanting along with the strumming.

  Then there had been a big fight over whether they should listen to a Jefferson Airplane album or just turn on KMPX and lie on the floor. The party had ended up being a bunch of strange people doing weird stuff and playing loud music. That was supposed to be enlightenment? At one point it had gotten so loud that Johnny had yelled at them to shut up and peace out. Then someone suggested doing a flaming groovy, and they almost set the ceiling on fire.

  Johnny opened the door and peeked down the hall. None of his roommates were up yet, and he was glad of that. He had made a bit of a jerk of himself by reproving his roommates’ obnoxious behavior, and he really didn’t want to face them this morning. Instead, he headed quietly down the stairs and out the door. There was a good breakfast place on Haight Street, and he wanted some strong coffee to wash the bitter taste out of his mouth and some decent food to help him feel better.

  The air outside was crisp and cool as he went down the stoop onto the street. His Volkswagen bus was sitting at the curb. It had been dark blue when his father bought it for him back in Levittown, but now it was covered with green and orange Day-Glo flowers and glued-on pictures of the Beatles and Timothy Leary.

  As he looked at the van, he remembered the day he had decorated it and how tripped-out he had been. These days, instead of feeling excited and high on life as he had then, he felt weary and anxious. He stared at his bus for a minute, shook his head, and then headed down the street past the Unique Men’s Shop. Mnasidika, a clothing store, was closed and dark, and the Psychedelic Shop next door was shuttered.

  People were starting to crawl out of the various pads they had crashed in the night before. As Johnny passed them by, he noticed that they all looked like weird, hairy rodents, scratching their lice-ridden heads and blinking at the strange yellow ball in the sky. He walked by the free clinic and noticed the sign in the window.

  “Closed. Free penicillin shots on Monday at nine a.m. Free food today
at the Diggers tent in the Panhandle.”

  The cafe at the foot of Clayton Street was just opening, and Johnny went in and saw an empty table toward the back. It was September in San Francisco, and Indian summer was in its full glory. The sun was streaming in the front windows, and the bright light was hard on his eyes. He grabbed a menu from the rack by the cash register on his way to the table, and once he was seated, he scanned it quickly. Crash Landing with eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon, and hot coffee looked really good.

  He took a quick look in his wallet to make sure the two twenty-dollar bills were still there, and then he caught the eye of the waitress. She shuffled over and took his order. He peeked at the two twenties again. He could hardly believe he was down to his last forty bucks. What had become of all the gigs he was going to get?

  Johnny the Candyman had arrived in San Francisco in the early spring of 1965. Even out in the wilds of Long Island, he heard that there was a Beat revival going on, led by the likes of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and Marty Balin. Johnny was an aspiring folksinger who read The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road in high school and became enthralled with the concepts of alienation, teenage angst, and rebellion. His father, a successful businessman, was never around much, and after Johnny found out about the mistresses his dad kept in two different cities, he shut his father out of his life.

  His mother solved her anger issues with martinis and garden-club meetings and more martinis, so Johnny was on his own for most of his teen years. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnny felt that any possibility for society to move away from the straight Eisenhower suburban lifestyle had disappeared forever. He started listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Byrds, took up the guitar, smoked some pot with his high school friends, and decided that the conventional life he was living in Levittown was a dead-end street. So in the spring of 1965 he packed his bags, liberated two thousand dollars from his mother’s bank account, and headed west in his van to San Francisco.

  Now, as Johnny waited for his breakfast, he rested his face in his hands. Six months in the City and this was it? This was what he came across the country for?

  He thought back to last night’s party. Sure people wore different clothes, had longer hair, but they still played the same mind games as the people he left in Levittown.

  Was there someplace he could go that was simpler? He remembered that National Geographic magazine someone had left at the Laundromat. The feature on Alaska was intriguing. Maybe life would be better there? Maybe they could use his musical talents, if San Francisco couldn’t. Well, it was a good idea, but it would have to wait. Thirty-six dollars wouldn’t get him very far. So now he was having his breakfast with a big question mark in his fuzzy mind and thirty-six dollars left in his wallet. His reverie was interrupted by a strident voice.

  “Candyman, my main man, what’s happening?”

  Johnny groaned.

  “I heard you guys were trippin’ big time last night. You should have let me know. I’m always up for a good time!”

  The person Johnny was not too excited about seeing was short and swarthy with two days’ growth of beard and long, dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had on a leather jacket with bikers’ colors on a vest over it. The patch on the back of the vest read, “The Death Heads” in red letters surrounding a grinning skull over crossed bones.

  “Hey, Shub,” Johnny said. “It wasn’t really that big of a deal, more like a last-minute kind of get-together. We split some acid and smoked a little pot. Nothing great.”

  “Well, let me know next time,” Shub grumbled. “Mind if I join ya?”

  Noting that Shub had already slid into the chair across from him, Johnny acknowledged his new tablemate with a nod.

  “Say, Candyman, how you fixed for bread these days?” Shub asked.

  “Funny you should ask, Shub,” he replied. “I’m getting ready to split town, and I’m a little short.”

  “Well, I got a way for you to make a few hundred if you’re interested,” Shub said with a crooked grin.

  “What do I have to do?” Johnny asked suspiciously.

  “Not a whole lot, my man,” Shub said. “Just give me a ride to Pacifica and back. I have a transaction to make, and I can’t do it on my bike, if you know what I mean.”

  Johnny lowered his voice. “You doing a deal or something?”

  Shub answered in a whisper. “This is the big one, Candyman. The gold mine, the mother lode. I got some guys who want to buy a bunch of LSD, and I happen to have twenty grams.”

  “Where did you get that much acid?” Johnny asked.

  Shub gave Johnny a conspiratorial wink. “Never you mind, my man. Are you in or not?”

  “Okay, I’m in, but I need a hundred up front, and I stay in the car while you do your business,” Johnny said. “What time do you need me?”

  “Seven o’clock tonight, corner of Fell and Stanyan.”

  “I’ll be there,” Johnny said.

  “Cool,” Shub said as he pulled out a roll of cash and slipped Johnny five twenty-dollar bills. “Now that we’ve got that settled, I have a question.”

  “Ask away,” Johnny said.

  “How come everybody calls you Candyman?”

  “My real name is Jonathan Hershberger,” Johnny said. “When I first came to town I was tripping with some freaks who wanted to call me Hershey Bar. I didn’t particularly appreciate that, so I straightened them out. They decided to call me Candy Bar instead, then Candy, and then the Candyman. And that’s the story in a nutshell.”

  “Hershberger, huh? Sounds like some kind of a weird sandwich. Is that Jewish?”

  “Don’t really know,” Johnny said. “I’m not exactly sure what it is—maybe German or something.”

  Shub started to get up from the table, and then Johnny found himself blurting out a question. “Say Shub, can I ask you something?”

  Shub paused and then slid back down in his seat. “What is it, my man?” he asked.

  Johnny paused. “Do you know anything about farms?”

  “Farms?”

  “Yeah, farms. I’m not sure if it happened when I was tripping or after I went to sleep, but this morning when I woke up, I remembered something about farms and horses, and I don’t know exactly what was going on, but it was so real.”

  “Yeah?”

  Johnny paused, and then it came out in a rush. “I was walking behind a team of horses, driving an old-fashioned plow, of all things. I’ve never even seen a plow except in pictures. I could smell the dirt as it broke up and turned over beneath the blade. As I watched the plow, it was like the clods were trying to escape, but they just broke apart, and the blade turned them under. Other guys were there with me. They were dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and the older men all had beards. They wore boots, but I was barefoot—I could feel the ground under my feet, pushing up between my toes.”

  “Yeah? And then what happened?” Shub asked.

  Johnny swallowed. He didn’t like sharing himself with other people, but he felt like he needed to tell someone about this. “The dirt between my toes was almost comforting. Then as I walked, my legs began to sink in, and I felt the strangest sensation. It was like roots began to grow out of the bottom of my feet into the ground. And as they grew, I began to feel…I dunno, empty or lonely. What do you think that was about?”

  Shub stared at Johnny with a strange, sad look on his face. “Wow, that’s heavy, man,” he said slowly. “You know, I kind of understand what you’re talking about.”

  “What do you mean?” Johnny asked.

  “I grew up on a farm in eastern Washington State,” Shub replied. “When I was a kid, I used to go walk out in the fields after they were plowed. I’d walk way out until I couldn’t see any roads or power lines. I’d take off my shoes and walk in my bare feet in the dirt. It was like I was connected to the land or something. I really loved that place.”

  “Why did you leave?” Johnny asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Shub
said sadly. “I just kind of drifted away.”

  Shub sat quietly for a minute and then pushed away from the table and stood up. “Behave now,” he said with a crooked smile. “See you tonight.”

  Then Shub walked away, and as he watched him go, Johnny had an empty feeling in his heart.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Long and Winding Road

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, Johnny pulled up at the corner of Fell and Stanyan, and Shub climbed into the van with a large leather briefcase in his hand.

  “Let’s go, my man,” he said, and Johnny headed for Nineteenth Avenue.

  The drive was uneventful. Johnny followed Highway 1 until they came to a motel on the south side of Pacifica near Devil’s Slide. They pulled into the parking lot, and Johnny stayed in the van while Shub went inside.

  “Keep the motor running,” he said as he climbed out. “I don’t trust these guys.” He opened his jacket to show Johnny the butt of a revolver in the inside pocket.

  “Wait a minute, Shub,” Johnny said. “I didn’t know there were going to be guns involved.”

  “Listen, kid,” Shub growled. “When you’re dealing with this much money, you always come prepared. Don’t worry. I’ll be out in about five minutes, and we’re outta here.”

  Johnny sat in the van and watched as the fog rolled in from the ocean. The yellow streetlamps became fuzzy glows, barely visible in the dark. Cars whizzed by, headed down the coast or into the city. The neon motel sign flashed on and off, on and off, the green letters flickering strangely in the mist.

  A sudden chill ran down Johnny’s back. He tensed for a moment but then relaxed and stretched his shoulders. The van’s engine puttered quietly away. Johnny’s ears perked up when he thought he heard raised voices. At first they were indistinct. He rolled down the window to hear better, and then he heard someone shout, “He’s got a gun!”