Amber

by Dan-Dwayne Spencer

I slumped down in the seat and tried to calm myself. Mr. Dark moved again. This time I pressed my lips together, ensuring I didn’t make an unconscious sound. The realization I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t actually happening made my nerves rocket straight to DEFCON five. I clutched at my chest.

  “I can’t blame you for being upset. I mean, look at you.” Roger put his hand on my drying arm slime, and whispered, “Do you think they’ll pass out the drugs when we get there? Maybe the naked hippie chicks will pass them out.

  I sat, speechless. True, it was one of my innermost thoughts, but to hear it said out loud. It sounded scandalously wicked. If Rose heard him, she didn’t react. Her thoughts were probably so tangled up with Dave’s welfare she wasn’t paying Roger any attention.

  In about five minutes, we pulled up to the commune. I don’t exactly know what I expected, but it wasn’t anything like what I saw. The commune grounds could have passed for a trailer park. It was scenically nestled between trees growing in the fingerling edges of a small forest. Spruce and oak shaded the makeshift tents and trailer houses. Around the perimeter outlining the group of homes were large lights on poles illuminating an area on the open, grassy meadow. A flat black platform sat atop each pole, hardly visible in the night’s blackness. I wondered if they stationed pole sitters to watch the area, or maybe it was just a hippie thing.

  The road ended where seven old model cars appeared to be abandoned. Someone had lined them up by the road. Rose pulled up alongside them. Tall posts and an overhead sign made an archway above a path leading across the meadow. The sign read: Happy Hollow.

  Across the meadow, two people approached. A bare-chested guy with skin the color of chocolate milk, sporting a head full of long dreadlocks tied into a ponytail and wearing low cut bellbottom jeans, strolled with a brunette chick wearing a maxi-skirt made of scrap pieces of old denim. Her halter top dangled fringe around her belly button. They headed toward the Mustang, down a well-worn path across the illuminated meadow. In each hand, they held several beaded necklaces and some cut flowers. My heart skipped a beat. Real hippies in a real Bohemian commune, and I was there with no supervision. At the moment I felt no inhibitions, it felt like the darkness of night covered my fear in a soft black blanket.

  Chapter Six

  Shameless Expectations

  Looking up at the two hippies approaching the car, Rose said, “They don’t like cigarette smoke.” She took a last drag on the Doral and mashed it into the Mustang’s ashtray.

  Standing outside the driver’s side window, the chick wearing the fringed halter top smiled, opened her arms wide, and let the flower petals cascade over the hood. “Peace and love to you, friends.”

  Rose stepped out of the car. Upon seeing her, joy beamed in their eyes as if she had been gone for days. Arms around necks and shoulders, they hugged. “Rosie, honey, you’re home early, and you’ve brought guests,” the woman exclaimed.

  Rose introduced the couple as Flower and Stoney. Considering the fact he lived in a commune, I figured he wasn’t called Stoney just because he had a rock-hard six-pack under his love beads.

  Stoney greeted us, “Man, be welcome. We are all family here.” Then he put a string of mismatched handmade beads around my neck and turned to Jimmy to repeat his greeting. When he got to Roger, he finished his welcome with, “Man, you look hungry.”

  As for Roger, it was true, he always looked hungry. Tall, skinny, and in need of a sandwich, even though we had eaten about three hours ago. After the ordeal with the trucker, I felt hungry—tired, hungry, and nervous. I expected a parade of naked hippie chicks at any moment.

  When we didn’t hurry down the path leading to the trailers, relief settled my emotions. At least for the time being, I didn’t have to worry about drugs, nudity, or any other hippie decadence.

  Flower and Stoney were very interested in our recent adventures. Rose told them about the harrowing events at the diner. At first, we all stood around, then as an alternative to standing, Roger and I claimed a spot on the grass to sit—there was a green patch near the Mustang’s front right tire. Rose, who constantly held Jimmy’s hand, casually sat on the car with him. Roger purposefully positioned himself so he didn’t have to watch Jimmy’s romantic gestures.

  “You need some ginger tea and an hour of tranquil meditation,” Stoney advised as he repeatedly patted Rose’s arm. Being extra sensitive to odd behavior, I thought these hippies were more touchy-feely than any people I’d ever known. If he were a student at my school, I would swear he was trying to flirt with Rose, then when Flower gave Rose’s arm a vigorous rubbing I decided it had to be some hippie thing, and let it go.

  Looking from one of us to another, Flower smiled and spoke with an encouraging, mentoring tone, “Tea and meditation are good for everyone. You’ll see.”

  Roger complained, “I’d rather have a sandwich.” Looking from me to Jimmy, he blurted, “What? They offered.” He rolled his eyes. “What happened to getting us food? Now it’s just talk and tea.”

  Flower gave him a peaceful smile. “We can manage that too.” She looked my way and laughed as if she had seen me for the first time. “You, in the mud, is this coating of drying clay intentional? Are you wearing it as a form of medicinal therapy?”

  “No. I’m wearing it because I’m the shmuck who jumped in and towed Dave out of the playa at the accident site.” I waved toward the general direction of the highway. I had hoped they would recognize my moment in the sun—no one else there seemed to.

  “You are brave to be so young.” Flower replied.

  And there it was again. My damned button nose did it every time. It put me at least three years younger than my actual age. I added frustration to my confused bag of emotional trauma. Attempting to calm my angst, I breathed deeply and wondered what her perception was of three teenage boys traveling alone? I glanced around the group and remembered what the store clerk said to Jimmy. To them, we were probably two teenagers and an older man. Hell, everyone who met us probably thought our twenty-five-year-old brother was babysitting us. No way would a hippie chick go for someone who needed a babysitter—more frustration.

  Roger migrated to straddle the fender over the headlight as best he could. To clear my head and rid myself of my nagging fears, I needed a distraction, so I decided to ask lots of questions. Maybe if I learned more about the commune, it would calm my apprehension about their Bohemian hippie lifestyle.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Roger beat me to it by asking, “If there’s a bunch of you living here you must have one heck of a grocery bill.”

  Stoney pointed east. “Out there beyond the habitats are fields where we grow most everything we need. The other necessities and little luxuries, like Rose’s cigarettes, are provided by people who work outside the commune.”

  Rose said, “At the center of the commune is a covered pavilion we call The Roundhouse. It provides a general meeting place when we all need to come together.” She made it sound like it was a tent stretched between two elaborate treehouses.

  Roger shamelessly asked about drugs. Stoney answered, “Most of us are vegetarians and health advocates who wouldn’t think of putting any drug in our bodies. Eat pure and live pure. That’s our motto.” Smiling, he looked straight at Rose, “However, some of us have old habits we find hard to break.”

  To Roger’s disappointment, it turned out, Stoney was his given name on his birth certificate. His folks were Jesus freaks, and it had something to do with Saint Peter.

  Jimmy couldn’t keep quiet. He had to know. “I’m curious…you all, everyone here I mean….” He blushed. “You do wear clothes. I mean all the time—right?”

  Stoney laughed and replied, “We are just like you. Do you wear your clothes all the time?”

  Jimmy blushed a darker red and answered, “No.”

  “We don’t walk around nude for the sake of being nude. If that’s what you’re asking? You’re confusing a commune with a nudist colony.” Stoney smiled and assured him, “We work
, play, and do the things everyone does. We simply reject the conventional rules and social structure preventing the people outside our commune from discovering their true self.”

  Jimmy nodded, his face returning to its normal hue. Stoney’s speech might have consoled Jimmy, but what I heard wasn’t an emphatic no. He left a lot of room for my imagination to contrive a smorgasbord of decadence about the unconventional lifestyle he described.

  Then Jimmy tilted his head and got a puzzled expression. “When we were driving up, I counted about ten trailers and maybe a half-a-dozen tents. How many people live here?”

  Stoney volunteered an answer, “There are about twenty-two active residents here and seven of those are children. Last month we numbered twenty-six.”

  “Did the other four go back home?” Roger asked.

  “No, but I don’t want to burden you with community problems.” He smiled and handed Roger another beaded necklace. “Wearing beads of love bonds us to the universe.”

  Roger leaned over to me and quipped, “Then Rose and the universe are on a first-name basis.”

  Jimmy spoke up again, “I suppose Rose’s job pays the electric bill.”

  Stoney smiled, shaking his head. “We use photovoltaic energy to power the few devices we have.”

  We blankly looked at them and back to each other, our ignorance plastered on our faces. We had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Some people call it solar power,” Stoney explained. “You might have noticed the fixtures above the lights when you drove in. Those are photovoltaic collectors capturing the energy from the sunlight.”

  Jimmy scowled. “But it’s dark now. There’s no sunlight to run the lights.”

  “The panel atop each pole collects and stores the power in a series of car batteries for night usage. Look across the meadow. There are fourteen pole lights there. Those lights are drawing energy from twenty-eight batteries.” Stoney’s tone was matter-of-fact. Somebody living here had to be super smart to set all this up.

  I gave Flower my best happy eyes expression and asked, “Can people like me, I mean teenagers, choose to join you and live in the commune?”

  “We counsel everyone who wants to become a part of our community,” she replied. “Some we accept and some we don’t. It all depends on their expectations.” Her expression changed, and she leaned forward, taking a second look at my eyes. I wondered if my secret weapon was working on her. After all, I might have a chance with an older hippie chick—maybe. As she neared, I also looked into her eyes. They were the clearest azure blue I had ever seen. Looking at them made me think of perfect summer days, green fields, and fluffy clouds. I think I actually felt warm sunshine for a moment. Her expressive gaze communicated health and innocence. All considered, since my thoughts had just taken a turn into the wild side, I wasn’t sure how I felt about her anymore.

  Looking me in the eyes, she stood, took my arm, blinked, and rubbed her index finger across my cheek. “There you are. I finally see you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I sounded indignant. That wasn’t the response I wanted. The duplicity of my instinctive impulses and primary desires battling my reluctant and bashful inhibitions raged inside me. My emotions tumbled. My heart pounded, my pulse raced, and my head felt like it would explode. There I stood with mud in every crevice and this touchy-feely woman saying weird-ass crap?

  She took my hand, and I felt a tingle I had never felt before, I’m certain I wasn’t thinking with my brain when I decided she was pretty groovy. On one hand, I wanted her touch, and then on the other, it still scared the life out of me. At least my headache shut down.

  Ignoring my outburst, she called out to the others. “Go ahead to the Roundhouse. This one needs to wash. We’ll catch up with you later.” Her strange statements aside, this aging flower child was turning out to be pretty hip. I kept telling myself a twenty-something chick wasn’t out of my league. After all, how long do you have to know someone to like them? Trust, however, is a different story. Trust is earned.

  We walked along a path leading away from the trailers and the lighted meadow. The farther we walked down the sloping terrain, the hill behind us rose until the road went out of sight. Being lower and away from the light, the path grew dark. Thank goodness the moon finally made an appearance. Without it, I would have never been able to maneuver the nature trail’s narrow switchbacks. To me, we seemed to be going nowhere. About the time I suspected Flower of being a serial killer or some evil succubus, we stepped down into a tiny valley or hollow where a river ran through the property.

  There, extending out from the riverbank, a wooden deck hung over the water in a pier-like fashion. At the end of the deck, steps descended into the river. My imagination started running wild.

  Flower opened a storage box attached to the wooden decking and retrieved a bar of soap and a cloth. “I think this will help wash the mud off and out of those hard-to-reach places.”

  With my imagination operating in overdrive, all I heard was “I… will help wash… those hard-to-reach places.” Most guys would have been glad to join in with any hippie washing rituals, but to be honest, my fear overtook my excitement. I wasn’t ready to let a chick give me a scrub down, not even one wearing a hot fringed halter top. Acquiring a defensive posture, my words became abrasive. “I’ve been able to wash myself since I was five.”

  Smiling, as if she read my mind, she handed me the cloth and soap. “I assure you, I never intended anything else.”

  Sitting on the decking and dipping the cloth in the water, I rubbed at the mud, rinsed the filth from the rag, and repeated the motion.

  “That will take too long.” She laughed and pushed me into the river. Not knowing what to expect, I started swimming.

  “Stand up,” Flower told me. “Stand, it’s shallow.”

  Placing my feet securely under me, I stood. The water level only came to my waist. “I’ll be damned,” I said. It wasn’t an epiphany or even a desire, but it came to my mind and out of my mouth. That’s the way with idle words, regretfully they have a way of coming true.

  For a moment, I laid back and floated. It was cool and fresh. Not at all like the muck in the playa. This was good. My headache completely left and I could relax.

  “Toss me your muddy shorts. I’ll wash them out over there in our tub and ringer. Some detergent will get the clay out of the fabric.”

  “My shorts? Oh, you mean my swimsuit.” Suddenly realizing I would be naked at the river with a hippy chick, my mistrust hit DEFCON level three, and the words of the old codger at the restaurant rattled in my head. I exclaimed, “It’s all I have on. I’ll be naked. I left my other clothes in the car.”

  She answered me with a melodic, soothing quality to her voice, “I promise, in this darkness, no one can see below the water. When I’m finished washing them, I’ll leave them easily in your reach. You can put them back on before you get out of the river.”

  She sounded sincere, but my mistrust had already gone to DEFCON level two. In an effort to not show my anxiety, I shrugged. Keeping my butt well below the surface, I shyly grinned, slipped my swimsuit off, and tossed it onto the deck. The water rushing around me felt like freedom.

  Chapter Seven

  The Chosen

  It took Flower only a few minutes to wash out my swim trunks and lay them out on the deck to dry. It’s a guess, but I figured she knew I would not get much scrubbing done with her there because when she finished, she left saying I needed my privacy. Alone, and up to my waist in clean fresh water, I felt the liberty to swim around and enjoy myself. The soap and cloth turned out to be exactly what I needed to get rid of the playa’s leftovers. As for the river, it wasn’t like some I’d seen where the water rushed along, making whitecaps and all. Rather it moved at a brisk flowing pace, washing over me only to swirl in recesses near the shore.

  Whoever had the idea to build those steps at the end of the deck was a genius. It made climbing out of the river as easy as walking onto my ba
ck porch. I slipped my swim trunks on and sat on the deck, kicking and splashing the water below. Flower had been right. It was difficult to see the cracks in the decking, much less anything in the water.

  Maybe I expected to be greeted by a hundred naked hippies holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” After all, my expectations of the commune were based on one old codger’s remarks about a hippie girl he befriended in a diner. As it turned out, his description had been completely off base. Regretfully, I had been there for forty-five minutes and I hadn’t been enticed, drugged, or encouraged to run around naked.

  Quite the opposite. In fact, Flower gave me space and respected my privacy. While I bathed, she washed my clothes like a mom would. Come to think of it, there was something matronly about her, despite the halter and the dangling fringe. She reminded me of a sexy version of Donna Reed. How could a twenty-something woman wearing a hot halter top remind me of a television version of a mother? I decided that would require some intense thought.

  Moms on TV are all helpful and caring, doing all the best things for their kids. They bake cakes, clean the house, and help with those extra credit projects—doing all of it while wearing their high heels and pearl necklaces. I would trade my mom for Lucille Ball or Shirley Jones any day. The very best thing about those TV moms was how they never yelled hateful things at people, at least not like mine did, and they made me laugh.

  Maybe that was why Flower reminded me of a TV mom. She talked softly. I couldn’t imagine her yelling at anyone. Though it seemed a good comparison, I would never compare Flower to my psycho mother. They were nothing alike.

  Simply thinking about mom, much less the thought of going home, made my stomach do flip-flops. I consoled myself by relaxing and assessing the area; even through the darkness, I could tell this was one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It would’ve been possible for me to have sat by the river and reveled in its peaceful flow forever, all the while pondering the mysteries of my life. But as some great person once said, all good things must come to an end. It was time for me to find my friends.