NSummer

by Never Summer (retail) (epub)

  The only reason he and his good fellows had not disabled the bulldozer on the previous occasion, along with the two skidders, was because the owner had installed a detachable steel jacket on both sides of the engine housing. The damn thing was padlocked on both sides. It had proved to be a simple but effective deterrent. They had not been able to gain access to the engine. Tonight, however, things would be different. He had come prepared. Pinecone had brought along a hacksaw and plenty of tungsten-alloy blades. They would cut the bolts that held the protective metal hood in place, then destroy the engine. Cutting the bolts would be tedious work. It might take them an hour, or more, but no sweat. There were three of them. They would take turns. He had also brought a small can of oil to lubricate the hacksaw blade and help muffle the sound.

  The three now crept in closer. They were kneeling very quietly in the shrubbery at the edge of camp. For several minutes they waited in the pitch darkness, listening intently. The party had been winding down even before the cop’s arrival. Now, two loggers left the fire. Pinecone could not see them clearly. The men appeared to be moving slowly through the darkness toward the trailers. The fire had burned down.

  “Listen,” Mike whispered. “Do you hear?”

  There were voices. “Yes,” Steve whispered. Next, they heard a door close. Nary a sound. A blanket of silence enveloped the logging camp.

  Steve put a finger over his lips. “Shhhhhh,” then motioned for his comrades to follow him as he crawled forward. Slowly he inched ahead toward the dozer. Pinecone and Mike followed in single file. They wore black sweaters and stocking caps like commandos, and had even darkened their faces with black shoe polish. Not that they were fond of the war machine. On the contrary, their charge was a sacred trust, the defense of Nature.

  When Steve reached the bulldozer, which was parked on a low-flatbed, he paused and waited for his companions to creep alongside. When they were in position, Pinecone produced a penlight and swept its tiny beam up and down the heavy equipment. He passed the light very briefly across the engine housing, then, clicked it off. Now that they were oriented, Pinecone led the way. He crawled up onto the flatbed trailer toward the business end of the cat. Very quietly, Pinecone raised his head up over the side of the D-6. Steve and Mike were right behind him.

  Huh…?

  A face stared at him out of the darkness. Pinecone was startled. Someone, it had to be a logger, was sitting in the driver’s seat. The man was no more than a few feet away. Pinecone felt like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus.

  Shit!

  They were exposed! How did it happen? He fought back a wave of fear. Too shocked to flee into the night, he shone the penlight on Steve and Mike, and saw the same shock of discovery. Acting on impulse, he turned the light onto the face above him...

  Whaa….?

  The face wore a yellow Day-Glo mask.

  Why does he look so familiar?

  The man was smiling like a long lost friend.

  “You boys here for the party?”

  THIRTY FOUR

  Camp was late rising next morning.

  By and by, however, loggers began appearing in ones and twos outside Bobby’s camper. No one had instructed them to do so. No order had been given. The assembly was entirely spontaneous. The men were still deep in vegetative euphoria. Indeed, the events of the previous evening were in progress. The loggers had a feisty look about them. Several were still wearing the Day-Glo. Most were half-dressed or in long underwear. Some were barefoot. A few were scratching their cojones. Hard-ons were general. Sourpuss Malone’s pizzle was thrusting defiantly out of his pants, pointing skyward.

  Two men showed up by virtue of the fact they never left. Shorty was still atop the boss’s dozer, slumped over the controls, snoozing in the driver’s seat. Credit the big man for never leaving his post. They found Fuzzy sleeping fitfully where he had passed out, his arms affectionately wrapped around a small aspen tree.

  Tom had awakened to the fulsome sweetness of wildflowers, his nose immersed in the labia-like petals of Indian Paintbrush (Castellja miniata).

  Wolfe and the Preacher were nowhere in evidence but their absence was not missed.

  Bobby was the last to appear. He stepped down from his camper in regal fashion sporting a bathrobe and slippers, a jaunty red towel tucked in at his neck like an ascot.

  There followed a collective improvisation.

  None of the men had a clue about what had transpired (and indeed was still transpiring) but this hardly dampened their enthusiasm. Certainly there are no words for it, for how does one describe the be-mushroomed experience in human language? How do you articulate disembodied consciousness, or explain the extra-corporeal mind? One might as well try to square the circle, or capture a moonbeam, a rainbow, or a scintillating drop of morning dew.

  Ineffability surely comes the closest, for it is just in the nature of the thing. “Just...” What a multifaceted sound. Can language truly do it just-ice? Or, are we “just” mouthing noises, platitudes, floundering about with our antiquated symbols and inadequate cliches? It was Heraclitus who, after hearing someone say that you cannot wade twice through the same stream, said, “No. You cannot do it even once!” Why not even once? Because that is just how it is.

  Another philosopher, Ludvig Wittgenstein, expressed the same idea, though somewhat differently. Ludvig never ate mushrooms, as far as anyone knows; but he broke the same sod, whacked the same nail. Ludvig argued that existence is such a warped woof that only a very few things can be intelligently spoken of. His advice: become practitioners of Zazen. Try spinning the big wheel. Imagine a chimp silently pointing…

  It was Charlie who finally assumed the role of group spokesperson, and vocalized what each man present wanted to know.

  “So, Tom, what’d you put in that there spaghetti?”

  But Tom was still basking in the mellow residuals. The best he could manage was a benign smile. The mystery would have remained but for Pissant, who spilled the secret, “Don’t you b-b-boyz know?” he stuttered. “It was them m-m-muchrooms.”

  Silence.

  “You mean, in the woods?” Charlie finally said.

  Pissant nodded.

  “Well, fuck a duck!”

  After considerable commotion, Pissant produced a bag of the said m-m-muchrooms. Charlie wanted a closer look and stuck in his paw. Sourpuss was there too, looking over his shoulder. Charlie retrieved a small fungus, held it up rather daintily in his big rough hands, studied it a moment, then, quickly passed it over to Sourpuss, who hesitated before taking it. The logger oh so gingerly lifted it to his nose and gave it a cautious sniff. Shuddering, he hurriedly passed it on to Dipstick. “Here, you take it,” he said, wiping his hand on his shirt. The daintiness caused sniggering all around.

  “Don’t give me that thingee!” Dip said. “Oh gross.”

  “Thingee!” a voice said. More sniggers.

  The loggers were not yet convinced, not entirely. Dipstick handled the cap in much the same manner, which is to say, cautiously, before he too passed it along. Each of the others did likewise, sniffed and studied the thing, then, hurried it on to the next fellow. Each seemed visibly relieved to be rid of it. So it went, until the host came back, full circle, to Charlie who was still holding the bag.

  “What the hell?” he said, and promptly ate it.

  “Even if it kills you, right, Charlie?”

  “Damn straight.”

  Charlie was still chewing to a buzz of nervous laughter. The loggers quietly watched as he gulped it down. Charlie made a face, and they looked relieved when he did not drop dead on the spot.

  “How’s the taste?”

  “Ugh!” he said with a loud belch.

  “They ain’t ‘thingees’,” Pissant said. “They’s the food of the gods. M-m-manna from heaven.”

  This touched a nerve. It was a Eureka moment. Their faces lit up at almost the same instant. They were now moving together up the same rapid learning curve, riding the same resurgent wave.


  It was a kind of group transmission, like the hundredth monkey.

  “Don’t hog the bag,” Jimmy said and grabbed it away. The big man produced a cap and held it under his nose. “What did you call ‘em? Food of what...?”

  “G-g-gods, Fuzz. Food of the g-gods.”

  “How many we got in there?”

  Jimmy made the count. “One, two, three...four left is all...That’s it.”

  “Damn! Not enough!” said Dipstick. Now he handled a mushroom with the air of a trained mycologist. “Not nearly enough. We’ll have to round up more…”

  “Yep. A lot more.”

  Four different loggers quickly downed the remaining caps. Even in the act there was loud whoop-dee-doo, a kind of group affirmation that sealed the collective insanity.

  They had arrived.

  What happened next was foregone, what one might expect of a group of uniquely different individuals, all of whom awaken one morning with the same thought uppermost in mind, all having dreamed the same dream. No surprise that they were tracking in the same groove. Had they not already been on a converging trajectory for many hours?

  There would be no start-up at Bowen Gulch this fine morning (nor the next, nor the one after that). It was just not going to happen. No, the firm grip of gainful employment had been irrevocably broken. The reality principle had lost its power over the crew. The concept of work had been dethroned. The verdict had come in. Their collective life sentence (the forty-hour workweek) had been commuted by general acclamation. Work and play now resembled the phases of a gestalt. To the extent that one (play) waxed, the other (work) must wane.

  To the group mind all of this was self-evident.

  There was also a dawning sense that the good times had arrived. The same proverb like unspoken fire was dancing on the tip of every tongue. But the actual ratification, when the just-described subterranean process of communal “group think” finally broke through and became fully conscious in a collective sense, did not happen until Charlie, again, gave it expression.

  “If that ain’t some ass-kicking shit I don’t know what!”

  “Amen,” echoed Dipstick.

  “It’s happening, boys!”

  “Fungus-amongus!”

  “You got that son of a bitch right!”

  There was a loud “Woooooooopeeee!”

  And that is how the group decision occurred to blow off work and get down to the important business of hunting up more of the m-m-muchrooms.

  Remember, these were not doped out beatnik poets in dark sunglasses and sandals.

  These were not bohemian artists out on the raggedy edge.

  These were not the sons of the literati flaunting their avant-garde lifestyle.

  These were not zonked out acid-heads tootling pedestrians from some psychedelic bus.

  Nor were these Dead Heads panhandling admission to the next rock and roll orgasm in the sky.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, and no again. No, these were loggers. L-O-G-G-E-R-S. And if such a thing could happen to such staid individuals, well, could it not happen to anybody? If it could happen here, in the bosom of the beast, in the veritable heartland of rip-it-up America, might it not happen anywhere? Which is to say, mothers and fathers, if you know what’s good for your precious babes, you better manacle them. Lock them up.

  Because no place is safe from the groove machine.

  So it went, all manner of spontaneous camaraderie, laughter and joking around, horseplay, hoots and howls, arm twisting, shoulder slapping, back thumping, tussling, and so on.

  That is, until Bobby’s girlfriend Rusty poked her dusky blonde head out the door of Bobby’s camper. None of the men had seen her up to this point. It was Rusty’s first appearance in camp. To say that her lovely countenance caused a stir would be a considerable understatement.

  There was a stoned silence.

  The sight of her was like a seed crystal dropping into a super-cooled fluid. That is what started them moving, the stone that gathers no moss.

  As if drawn by invisible threads, five of the loggers, including Tom, hurriedly crowded into Thurston’s Jeep Wagoneer.

  No one had verbalized any collective intent. No need. The group mind was leap-frogging ahead. The men (each one as horny as a billy goat) already knew the destination. They were headed for the Kawuneechee Lodge at the foot of the valley, some six miles away, on the road to Granby, the site of the nearest public telephone. The purpose of the sudden expedition: to summon wives, lovers, and girl friends from Granby, Fort Collins, Loveland, Kremmling and points beyond.

  Thurston and company did not get away clean. By the time Jimmy fired up his rig and backed out into the road, Pissant and Shorty were swarming against the glass and pounding on the hood, with urgent appeals to “Hey while you’re at it, Dip, how about asking Sally to bring her girlfriends, and her kid sister too, if she has one, and, for that matter, anything in a dress (aunts, nieces, mothers, no problem, even grandmothers). Oh, and don’t forget to pick up a few cases of beer. Supplies are running low.”

  When the messages had been duly conveyed, the Wagoneer disappeared down the road out of camp en route to the Kawuneechee.

  Sourpuss and Kermit jumped in their own rigs and followed solo.

  Shorty and Pissant were left standing in the road amidst their own thoughts, the dust of departure settling upon them.

  But not for long.

  Soon, these left behinds returned to camp, pulled on their boots, pants too, and armed themselves, each with a plastic garbage bag. By unanimous assent of the group brain, Shorty and Pissant had become co-chairmen of the m-m-muchroom collection committee. Pissant was the mushroom expert. He knew where to find them.

  Presently, the two herded up and splashed across the little creek behind the camp into the deep timber to gather up Nature’s bountiful harvest.

  During all of this feverish activity, Bobby Lighthorse had hardly moved from his spot where, still in his bathrobe, he had watched the wacky business. Mushroom mania had carried the day, sweeping everything before it.

  Things were not as they appeared, however. Bobby had not been left behind. On the contrary, he was, even now, the scout leading the pack, blazing trail for the others.

  When the departures and rushing about hither and yon were done, he strolled toward his camper. Bobby was already feeling the first effects of the half-dozen mushrooms he had consumed earlier that morning in lieu of solid fare. Three times as many as anyone had downed the previous day. Rusty was there to greet him, smiling sweetly as she poked her cute little head out of the camper door. Bobby could not see the rest of her, but he suspected she was still in her nightie. Visions of sugarplums levitated behind his eyeballs.

  Ah, she is a lovely thing, more lovely this morning, I believe, than I’ve ever seen her.

  “Golly, what happened?” Rusty said in her pert manner. “It got real quiet.”

  “Yes.” Bobby said, looking up into her attractive face.

  “Where’s the boys?”

  “Gone this way and that, honeybun.” He motioned with two hands in opposite directions. “But don’t fret, they’ll be back soon enough. Let’s enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts.”

  Bobby was wearing thin-soled slippers, however, and as he stepped toward the trailer he came down on a sharp little stone. “OW! OW! OW! OW!” Grimacing, he hopped about on one foot and nearly fell over. He pulled off the slipper and rubbed his heel, chaffing at the smart.

  Rusty giggled, hand over her mouth. “Well I declare, you logger men aren’t half as tough as you let on.” She had a fresh tongue, Rusty did. She was a southerner, Georgia born. A peach.

  “That’s my girl,” Bobby said as he stepped up into the trailer. When she turned he gave her a playful slap on the behind.

  THIRTY FIVE

  Jacques St. Clair streaked by the Kawuneechee Lodge at seventy miles an hour. He was slowly gaining elevation as he moved up the valley. As a general rule, the boss drove with his foot on the floor; howe
ver, on the return from Rustic he had stayed under the limit most of the way. He could not afford to lose the lowbed driver who was following him with the rented skidder. Due to the heavy load the guy could barely keep up as it was. However, they were now within a few miles of Bowen Gulch and the boss’s foot got the better of him. The lowbed driver could not go too far wrong. Jacques had been given him directions and the man would catch up. The boss stomped on it.

  He had awakened in a nasty temper and was now in a general funk, for during the long drive a noose of dread had been tightening around his thoughts. The pisser was knowing that but for the incompetence of others his logging operation would be on track at this very moment, yes, running smoothly, humming right along. But who can foresee such things? Who can predict the untoward actions of eco-nuts and arrogant attorneys and high-handed bureaucrats that so easily derail the best-laid plans of men? No wonder things fall apart.

  Jacques knew he’d been away too long. It had been less than two days but that was still too long to leave a project unsupervised. As he knew only too well, a timber operation has a way of going to seed when the boss is away. He had seen it happen before, yes, too many times, and he was not about to feel complacent now, even with a stand-in as able as Francis Delacour minding the store. Under ordinary circumstances Francis could be counted on to keep the lid on a job. But the project at Bowen Gulch had been anything but ordinary.

  It’s been a circus.

  Jacques began to anticipate what might lie beyond the next blind curve...

  Where will the next blow fall? If something can go wrong it will.

  Thus saith Murphy’s Law. Or was it the Peter Principle? For the life of him Jacques could not remember.

  Is it not human nature to weigh the prospects for success against the likelihood of failure? What is life but a parade of screwed up situations crying out for redress or resolution? A sage and honest man, accurately assessing the fleeting nature of human existence, will consciously cultivate a healthy sense of detachment, disavowing worldly success and failure alike. But alas, few men are wise, least of all when faced with life’s slings and arrows. Most men will brood in the face of adversity for the simple reason that most men hope for, no, a stronger word, most insist upon a happy outcome, deliverance from the mulish face of outrageous fortune; and to this human rule Jacques St. Clair was no exception.