Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  Bob helped Claudia hobble around the van and laid her down next to me on the bed for the cactus needle extraction of a lifetime. “Come on, buddy. There’s too many. I need your help. Don’t be squeamish. They don’t bleed too bad.”

  It wasn’t the cactus needles I was recoiling from. It was the image of my mother’s unkempt pubic hair pouring out from under her hiked-up, faded yellow short shorts. I felt deeply that this somehow violated the social contract every bit as much as Bob’s food theft and stingy tipping.

  We wisely left the mangled remains of the cactus garden by the side of the road and drove on in silence. We passed several more patches of cactus without any reaction from the adults. I relaxed my shoulders, confident that they could take care of themselves for the rest of the day.

  In the afternoon, we passed an Army convoy going in the other direction. Hundreds of military vehicles snaked back into the horizon. We watched in tense silence. Here was the military industrial complex on full, naked display.

  “How sad,” Bob finally said. “Being trained to destroy.”

  “And to kill,” added my mother, who pulled out her pocket instamatic camera to document the state monopoly on violence. “Oh my Goddess, look,” she said. “They’re waving at me.”

  “Why are they waving?” I asked.

  “Because they think I’m taking their picture because I think they’re heroes.”

  We all chuckled about how clueless the soldiers were. They looked young, the soldiers. I felt sorry for them. These young guys who had to go kill strange peasants in strange lands. But watching the convoy unfurl with its parade of the machines of war, I felt something else too. Twinges of jealousy. How exhilarating it must be to wear a uniform and fire guns, I thought. And to drive these wondrous tanks, half-tracks, and big trucks. And more. To be a part of something larger than yourself. Part of a powerful team of warriors. These were the modern-day knights. I thought about that convoy often, wishing at times that I could have been a part of it rather than the lonely boy in the blue van rambling down the empty highway.

  We stumbled back into Berkeley, unwashed and sunburnt, in time to hear the phone ringing in the Frog House. It was for my mother.

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. Her eyes were wild with fear. “He’s a madman. He’ll kill us all.” Just as she feared, Ronald Reagan had been elected president.

  This added extra urgency to our planned move back to the land, and we drove directly to Sacramento to see Mr. James. Bradford’s piglet was now an ugly, bristly pig, but Bradford was nowhere to be found. The green bus, however, was right where we left it. As Claudia was digging in her Mexican shoulder bag for a pen to sign the pink slip, Bob grabbed her arm.

  “Claudia! I just thought of something. If you put the bus in your name, I bet it’ll mess up your Welfare benefits. You know how the government is.” Bob had a panicked look on his face.

  Claudia thought about this. “You know, you’re probably right. I hadn’t thought of that. What should we do?”

  Bob appeared to be puzzled by the problem, taking a moment to work it through in his head. Finally, a solution emerged from his mouth. “Why don’t we put the bus in my name for now. That way they won’t be able to trace it back to you. Then, later, if we can figure out how to get by the Welfare rules, we can put it back in your name.”

  “Good idea.”

  Mr. James sold the bus to Bob for my grandmother’s $3,000. Then Bob sold his funky blue van to Mr. James for $100, and we headed back to the Bay Area for the last time.

  Before we left, I celebrated my fifth birthday with Uncle Tony, and he put me to sleep by chanting the Gayatri Mantra by my bedside. He pronounced the Vedic Sanskrit with a soft Spanish accent that made the mantra sound like gently bubbling water. I could feel myself beginning to drift into the dream world, gliding on the currents of his prayers.

  “Why do you say that mantra over me?” I mumbled.

  “I have to say it every night to keep you safe, to make your dreams come true.”

  “But what if I don’t see you again?”

  “I’ll say the mantra for you every night whether we’re together or not. Wherever you are in the world, you’ll be able to hear my voice when you go to sleep.”

  A few days later, someone ran through the halls screeching the news. John Lennon had been assassinated by the CIA. The killing sent the Frog House into a panic, and our packing went into overdrive. A chill, dark fog enveloped us as we shuttled the last of our worldly possessions into the green bus. The last things to go were our feminist cat, Ms.Ms., and a cage filled with the two white roosters one of the housemates had found terrorizing picnickers in Golden Gate Park. We were taking them back to the land with us. All of the Frog House turned out to see us off.

  “See ya, Baahb!” They called out, his name finally synonymous with relief and absurdity.

  The green bus coughed to life and rumbled forward, creaking under the weight of the two visions it carried back to the land. The roosters crowed, the cat hid, and I perched up front in the rocking chair. I was happy that our trip was beginning, but was very much looking forward to the moment the trip would be over. After so much talk and preparation, we were finally on our way to settle down and build a new community, to start a school for me, and to meet new friends. Bob’s buddies, Stan and Maureen, were waiting for us up in the town of Manton on the side of Mount Lassen, and they would introduce us around when we arrived. We’d be there just in time for Christmas.

  FOUR

  Back to the Land

  Our green bus set a course due north on I-5, and we crawled through endless expanses of withered farmland. When we reached Red Bluff, we turned east on State Route 36, and the road began to climb and curve as we navigated our way into the mountains. Around a bend, the sky darkened, and then the air was filled with fluttering white moths.

  “Snow!” Bob announced.

  It was snowing! I’d never seen snow before, and I ran up and down the bus singing, “It’s snowing, it’s snowing!” The roosters eyed me menacingly, and I returned to the rocking chair, panting and a little motion sick. Around the next bend, the whole Earth had turned to snow. Ahead of us, only the thin black ribbon of the roadway stood out from the amorphous sea of whiteness. The gentle flakes soon brewed up into a blizzard. The green bus crept forward. Bob was silent and tense, hunched over the wheel. After what seemed like hours of crawling along in this manner, Claudia spotted the sign for Manton. The snow flurries eased as we pulled through the cow-skull-capped gates of Stan and Maureen’s farm at nightfall. Instead of turning left toward the big glowing farmhouse, we turned right and bumped along parallel to a snow-rimed fence for some time until we came to a low outbuilding. A doorway of light opened, and a silhouette waved us in.

  We crunched through a thick field of sparkling snow and entered a Dorothea Lange photograph. Maureen was a long, leathery woman of indeterminate age with greasy dark hair that clung to the contours of her skull before jangling limply about her ears. “Come on in folks and git warmed,” said Maureen, welcoming us into her dilapidated home. The house was populated by a large black-and-white television, in front of which four gaunt children were gathered, and an old couch bleeding springs and stuffing. Maureen’s husband, Stan, lay on the couch. “You gotta forgive Stan,” she said. “He’s real full ah arthritis.”

  Stan waved from the couch. “Merry Christmas,” he coughed. He was thin and ashen with sunken eyes. He was missing every other tooth in his mouth so his head looked like it closed with a zipper whenever he smiled.

  In one corner lurked an unadorned little Christmas tree. Beneath it was a small pile of presents wrapped in newspaper comics. I took a place on the shag rug with the other children and watched the fuzzy car chase on television. Stan and Maureen’s children didn’t notice me. The place had the subtle but distinctively pungent odor of urine.

  “Come on, kids. Come on up here an’ git some chow.”

  The adults had prepared some card tables and covered th
em with an old sheet for the holiday feast. I was given a stool to sit on. A hodgepodge of miscellaneous cutlery was distributed, and small servings of meat and potatoes were doled out in order of age. Their sallow faces revealed no emotion, but the children eyed the competing portions jealously. Much to everyone’s surprise, Claudia and I passed on the meat. Claudia offered up the tray of tofu she’d prepared for the occasion. The fermented bean curd was passed around suspiciously, sniffed, and passed on. Stan said a blessing that seemed to be directed at some guy named Jesus, and then the children dug into their food like wolverines.

  “Ma,” grunted one of the big boys. “We git seconds?”

  “Sure ya do. It’s Christmas. Wait ya turn though,” Maureen called back.

  “So, Maureen,” began Claudia. “How big is your farm?”

  “Oh, I reckon about six hundred acres.”

  My mother nodded appreciatively. “And how is it held?”

  “What now?”

  “How do you own the land? In trust, as a cooperative, or some sort of nonprofit collective?”

  “Oh, Mr. Worthington owns the farm.”

  “And you rent it from him as a cooperative?”

  “Nah. Only thing we rent is this house. We got two bedrooms. One for the kids with a couple a bunk beds and one for Stan and me. It does us OK.”

  “So you don’t farm the land?”

  “Oh, Stan does nothing but farming. Or at least did nothing but till recent. He used to farm it all for Mr. Worthington. Now he’s more like fixing tractors and the like on account of the arthritis. I clean the Worthingtons’ house for ’em. But right now we done hit a rough patch. Stan’s laid up pretty good. Some days he just curls up in the fecal position the whole day.”

  “You mean the fetal position?”

  “Nah, you know, fecal, like a baby. Stan got rear-ended a while back, though, and we finally got us some settlement money. That’s the good news. We went and bought us…”

  “Some land?” Claudia interjected hopefully.

  “No. A cow. So now we’re getting us fresh milk. At least most days.”

  “But are you saving up to buy your own land?”

  “Saving? I wish. We’re in debt to Mr. Worthington already. And he just raised our rent.”

  Claudia’s class consciousness flared up into an incensed roar. “What!? In case this Mr. Worthington didn’t get the message, the feudal system was abolished in the Middle Ages. He’s a wealthy landowner, Maureen, and he’s treating you like serfs.”

  Maureen was a little taken aback and hurried to clear up the misunderstanding. “No, ma’am, I don’t know what middle-age system you’re talking about. We ain’t never been to the ocean, much less surfing.”

  “No, Maureen.” Claudia put her face in her hands and then looked up with controlled patience. “What I’m trying to tell you is he’s probably a millionaire. What interest does he have in raising your rent other than to control you?”

  Maureen came to Mr. Worthington’s defense. “Well, now for a person like that, he don’t think he’s rich. So, he’s probably thinkin’ he needs more money yet to be happy.”

  After a few more failed attempts to enlighten Maureen, Claudia retreated into silence and chewed at her tofu like it was meat.

  We froze that night in the green bus. I pulled my watch cap down over my ears and zipped my patchwork jacket up over my chin. I rooted down into the depths of my sleeping bag, but still couldn’t get warm, my breath crystallizing in the air above me. The roosters woke us before dawn, and we scrambled back into Maureen and Stan’s shack, where the woodstove pumped out some warmth. We watched our hosts open their meager presents: cheap little toys from Taiwan for the children, chewing tobacco for Stan, and wool socks for Maureen.

  “Boy are my feet gonna be warm this winter!” Maureen was genuinely excited about her socks.

  Bob and Claudia and I adjourned to the bus after the present-opening. I stamped my feet and clapped my hands to stay warm.

  “Baab!” my mother blasphemed in my grandmother’s dialect. “These people are complete peasants, what my father would have called the Great Unwashed.”

  Pretending to drive the green bus.

  “They’re good people, Claudia.”

  “That’s not the point, Baab. I’m not concerned with whether they’re good or not. The point is they’re like Okies straight out of the Dust Bowl. They’re indentured servants to the master on the hill. And they are most certainly not counter-cultural activists ready to start a conscious intentional community.”

  “They’re good people,” Bob mumbled in the general direction of the half-frozen roosters huddling in the back of the bus.

  “Do something, Bob!” my mother threatened, as she led me off the bus by the shivering icicle that doubled as my hand.

  Two things became clear to me as we alighted into a snow drift: 1) Utopia wasn’t happening here; and 2) We’d freeze to death if we had to spend another night in the bus.

  Bob fired up the green bus, executed a fourteen-point turn in the snowy driveway, and rumbled off toward town to check in with his other “contacts.” Claudia and I fled back into the malodorous shack to thaw out our extremities. Toward evening, we heard the bus snorting its way back up the driveway. Bob returned in a merry mood. He smelled of beer and announced he’d hooked us up with a house to stay in. He’d been to see Carole and Jim, who also lived in Manton. And they’d reminded him about his friend Susan. How could he have forgotten about Susan? He’d called Susan down at her house in San Francisco, from Carole and Jim’s place, and she said we could stay in her vacation cabin. In fact, she was happy to have us stay in her cabin. It was out of town, further up the mountain, way back in the woods. I fell asleep huddled on the floor of the green bus with the promise of warmth chanted into my ears by the staccato mumbling of the diesel engine and the growling of gears.

  I awoke to the gentle rumbling of Ms.Ms. as she purred with warm satisfaction on my belly. We were laid out on a dusty couch in a tiny log-walled room. Blinding sunlight, inspired by the glare of the snow outside, poured enthusiastically through the window above. I could hear Bob and Claudia talking in the next room, their conversation punctuated by the clatter and clink of metal and glass.

  “Bob, you don’t stir it. It’s rice, for crying out loud. You just let the water boil off.”

  “How am I supposed to know? I’m not from Chinatown.”

  “Are you sure we have permission to stay here?”

  “Yes, I told you. Sharon invited us to stay here while we make connections with community.”

  “I thought you said her name was Susan.”

  “She goes by both. Look, Susie wants us here, OK? This is a summer cabin for that lake that’s all frozen over right now. No one will be here for months. She’s not just doin’ us a favor. We’re doin’ her a favor.”

  “What are we doing for her?”

  “We’re looking after the house to make sure no one breaks in.”

  “Why would anyone want to break into this place?”

  “I don’t know. Crazy people.”

  “And she’s not going to mind that we tore into her fifty-pound sack of rice?”

  “No way. She said ‘Help yourself.’ Let’s put this on it.”

  “Bob, that’s really fancy stuff. It’s imported Worcestershire sauce.”

  “Sue said she didn’t mind. Jeez! I’m gonna put more wood on the fire.”

  Ms.Ms. and I closed our eyes again as the waves of heat radiated off of the woodstove. We loved the warmth, and we loved Susan or Sharon or whatever her name was for letting us hibernate in her cabin.

  The more suspicious Claudia became that Bob’s friend Susan didn’t exist, the more generous Susan became. She was almost saintly in her disembodied benevolence.

  Bob and me in front of the green bus on Mount Lassen.

  “I called her from town, Claudia. Don’t worry. She said she doesn’t mind if we eat all the rice. She said mia casa is sua casa.”
/>   “How come the lock on the front door is broken, Bob?”

  “She doesn’t believe in locks. She’s very Zen.”

  Claudia’s concerns were quickly muted because we ran out of money. And then the roads to town were snowed in. Under Bob’s gracious trusteeship, Susan’s generosity knew no bounds. As the weeks wore on, we ate up all the dry goods, including her fancy sauces and hand-canned preserves. Susan then authorized us to crack open her emergency supplies which, through rationing, got us through the rest of winter. She was so generous she didn’t even mind when Ms.Ms. clawed at the furniture or peed in the corner.

  “Don’t worry, buddy,” Bob waved his hand dismissively. “She loves cats.”

  One day the snow began to melt under a new, hotter sun. The white siegeworks barricading Susan’s cabin retreated, leaving a morass of mud and mangled greenery in their wake. Susan’s generosity had ended.

  “We gotta go,” announced Bob.

  The next day Claudia picked up her accumulated Welfare checks waiting at the Manton post office and rented a new place for us further up the mountain. It was a half-built cabin perched on the ridge above a little creek. The green bus clawed its way up the twisting driveway of volcanic rock. Claudia twirled her hands like a real estate agent.

  “Look at those pine trees. And the manzanita. You can eat their berries. And here’s the cabin. See how the refrigerator is outside? Ingenious. It gives us more room inside, and in the winter you just unplug it. We’ll save so much on electricity. And look… we’ve got land!”

  “And poison oak,” said Bob.

  Trapped inside over the winter, I had longed to be back in the relative warmth and comfort of the city, but I had to admit that spring on Mount Lassen was something amazing. Our little dirt road was hidden from the world by a canopy of sugar pines and lined with Ceanothus, gooseberry, and a brilliant mosaic of wildflowers. The bright colors and sweet scents gave the world an unreal gleam.